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Tupper, Martin Farquhar, 
1810-1889. 


Probabilities, an aid to 


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AN AID TO FAITH. 


BY THE 


AUTHOR OF “PROVERBIAL PHILOSOPHY.” 


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NEW YORK: ve tiwe 
WILEY & PUTNAM, 161 BROADWAY. 


1847. 


CONTENTS. 


An Arp To FarItTH . 
Gop AND HIs ATTRIBUTES 
Tue TRIUNITY 

THE GoDHEAD VISIBLE 
Tue ORIGIN OF Evin 
CosMOGONY 

ADAM 

THe Fant . : ; 
Tue Fioop 

Noa 

BABEL 

JoB : : : 
JosHUA 

Ture INCARNATION 
MAHOMETANISM 
RoMANISM . 

THE BiBLE 

HreAVEN AND HELL 
An OFFER 


CoNCLUSION . 


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Tue certainty of those things, which most surely are believed 
among us, is a matter quite distinct from their antecedent pro- 
bability or improbability. We “know, and take for facts that 
Cromwell and Napoleon existed, and are persuaded that their 
characters and lives were such as history reports them: but it 
is another thing, and one eminently calculated to disturb any 
disbeliever of such history, if a man were enabled to show, 
that, from the condition of social anarchy, there was an antece- 
dent likelihood for the rise of military despots ; that, from the 
condition of a popular puritanism or a popular infidelity, it was 
previously to have been expected that such leaders should have 
the several characteristics of a bigoted zeal for religion, or a 
craving appetite for worldly glory; that, from the condition 
liable to revolutions, it was probable to find such despots arising 
out of the middle class; and that, from the condition of reaction 
incidental to all human violences, there was a clear expectability 
that the power of such military monarchs should not be continued 
to their natural heirs. 

Such a line of argument, although in no measure required for 
the corroboration of facts, might have considerable power to per- 
suade & priori the man, who had not hitherto seen reason to 


6 PROBABILITIES : 


rr eee 


credit such facts from posterior evidence. It would have rolled 
away a great stone, which to such a mind might otherwise have 
stood as a stumbling-block on the very threshold of truth. It 
would have cleared off a heavy mist, which might prevent him 
from discerning the real nature of the scene in which he stood. 
It would have shown him that, what others know to be fact, is, 
even to him who does not know it, become antecedently probable ; 
and that Reason is not only no enemy to Faith, but is ready and 
willing to acknowledge its alliance. 

Take a second illustration, by way of preliminary. A wood- 
man, cleaving an oak, finds an iron ball in its centre ; he sees 
ihe fact, and of course believes; some others believing on his 
testimony. But a certain village-pundit, habitually sceptical of 
all marvels, is persuaded that the wonder has been fabricated by 
our honest woodman ; until the parson, a good historian, coming 
round that way, proclaims it a most interesting circumstance, 
because it was one naturally to have been expected ; for that, 
here was the spot where, two hundred years ago, a great battle 
had been fought: and it was no improbability at all that a car- 
bine-bullet should have penetrated a sapling, nor that the tree 
should thereafter have grown old with the iron at its heart. 
How unreasonable then would appear the pundit’s incredulity, 
if persisted in: how suddenly enlightened the rational faith of 
the rustic : how seasonable would be felt the useful learning of 
him, whose knowledge well applied can thus unfetter truth from 
the bandages of ignorance. 

Illustrations, if apt, are so well adapted to persuade towards a 
particular line of argument, that, at the risk of diffuseness, and 
because minds being various are variously touched one by one 
thought and one by another, I think fit to add yet more of a simi- 
lar tendency: in the hope that, by a natural induction, such in- 
stances may smoothe our way. 

- When an eminent living geologist was prosecuting his research- 


AN AID TO FAITH. 7 


a a a eth nlitaetinmemme 


es at Kirkdale cave, Yorkshire, he had calculated so nicely on 
the antecedent probabilities, that his commands to the laborers 
were substantially these: ‘‘ Take your mattocks, and pick up 
that stone flooring ; then take your basket, and fill it—with the 
bones of hyzenas and other creatures which you will find there.” 
We may fancy the ridicule wherewith ignorance might have 
greeted science : but lo, the triumph of philosophy, when its man- 
date soon assumed a bodily shape in—bushels of bones gnawed 
as by wild beasts, and here and there a grinning skull that looked 
like a hyena’s! Do we not see how this bears on our coming 
argument ? Such a deposit was very unlikely to be found there 
in the eyes of the unenlightened: but very likely to the wise 
man’s ken. The real probabilities were in favor of a strange 
fact, though the seeming probabilities were against it. 

Take another. We are all now convinced of the existence of 
America; and so, some three or four hundred years back, was 
Christopher Columbus—but nobody else. Alone, he proved that 
mighty continent so probable, from geometrical measurements, 
and the balance of the world, and tides, and trade-winds, and 
casual floatsams driven from some land beneath the setting sun, 
that he was antecedently convinced of the fact: and it would 
have been a shock to his reason as well as to his faith, had he 
found himself able to sail due west from Lisbon to China, without 
having struck against his huge probability. I purposely abstain 
from applying every illustration, or showing its specific differ- 
ence regarding our theme. It is better to lead a mind to think 
for itself than to endeavor to forestall every notion. 

Another. A Kissoor merchant in Timbuctoo is told of the 
existence of water hard and cold as marble. All the experience 
of his nation is against it. He disbelieves. However, after no 
~ long time, the testimony of two native princes who have been 
feted in England, and have seen Ice, shakes his once not un- 
reasonable incredulity: and the additional idea brought soon to 


8 PROBABILITIES : 


his remembrance, that, as lead cools down from hot fluidity to a 
solid lump, so, in the absence of solar~heat, in all probability 
would water,—corroborates and makes acceptable by analogous 
likelihood the doctrine simultaneously evidenced by credible wit- 
nesses. 

Yet one more illustration for the last. Few things in nature 
appear more unlikely to the illiterate, than that a living toad 
should be found prisoned in a block of limestone ; nevertheless, 
evidence goes to prove that such cases are not uncommon. Now, 
if instead of limestone which is a water-product, the creature had 
been found embedded in granite which is a fire-product ; although 
the fact might have been from eyesight equally unimpeachable, 
how much more unlikely such a circumstance would have ap- 
peared in the judgment of science. ‘To the rustic the limestone 
case is as stout a puzzle as the granite one; but 4 priori, the 
philosopher taking into account the aqueous fluidity of such a 
matrix at a period when reptiles were abundant, the torpid quali- 
ties of the toad itself, and the fact that time is scarcely an element 
in the absence of air, arrives at an antecedent probability which 
comforts his acceptance of the fact. The granite would have 
staggered his reason, even though his own experience or the testi- 
mony of others were sufficient, nay, imperative, to assure his 
faith : but in the case of limestone, Reason even helps Faith ; nay, 
anticipates and leads it in, by suggesting the wonder to be pre- 
viously probable. How truly, and how strongly this bears upon 
our theme, let any such philosophizing mind consider. 

« But enough of illustrations: although these, multipliable to 
any amount, might bring, each in its own case, some specific ten- 
dency to throw light upon the path we mean to tread: it is wiser 
perhaps, as implying more confidence in the reader’s intellectual 
powers, to leave other analogous cases to the suggestion of his 
own mind ; also not to vex him in every instance with the intru- 
sive finger of an obvious application. Meanwhile, it isa just 


AN AID TO FAITH. 9 


opportunity to clear the way at once of some obstructions, by 
disposing of a few matters personal to the writer ; and by touch- 
ing upon sundry other preliminary considerations. 

1. The line of thought proposed is intended to show it probable 
that anything which has been or is, might, viewed antecedently 
to-its existence, by an exercise of pure reason, have by possibility 
been guessed: and on the hypothesis of sufficient keenness and 
experience, that this idea may be carried even to the future. 
Anything, meaning everything, is a word not used unadvisedly ; 
for this is merely a suggestive treatise starting a rule capable of 
infinite application: and, notwithstanding that we have here 
and now confined its elucidation to some matters of religious mo- 
ment only, as occupying a priority of importance, and at all times 
deserving the lead; still, if knowledge availed, and time, and 
space permitted, I scarcely doubt that a vigorous and illuminated 
intellect might so far enlarge on the idea, as to show the antece- 
dent probability of every event which has happened in the king- 
doms of nature, providence, and grace: nay, of directing his 
guess at coming matters with no uncertain aim into the realms 
of the immediate future. The perception of cause in operation 
enables him to calculate the consequence, even perhaps better 
than the prophecy of cause could in the prior case enable him to 
suspect the consequence. But, in this brief life, and under its 
disturbing circumstances, there is little likelihood of accomplish- 
ing in practice all that the swift mind sees it easy to dream in 
theory : and if other and wiser pens are at all helped in the good 
aim to justify the ways of God with man, and to clear the course 
of truth, by some of the notions broadcast in this treatise, its 
errand witl be well fulfilled. : 

2. Whether or not the leading idea, so propounded, is new, or 
is new in its application as an auxiliary to Christian evidences, 
the writer is unaware: to his own mind it has occurred quite 
spontaneously and on a sudden; neither has he scrupled to place’ 


i 


10 PROBABILITIES : 


ee a eS eee 
it before others with whatever ill advantage of celerity, because 
it seemed to his own musings to shed a flood of light upon deep 
truths, which may not prove unwelcome nor -unuseful to the 
doubting minds of many. It is true that in this, as in most other 
human efforts, the realization of idea in concrete falls far short 
of its abstract conception in the mind: there, all was clear, 
quick, and easy ; here, the necessity of words, and the constraints 
of an unwilling perseverance, clog alike the wings of fancy and 
the feet of sober argument: insomuch that the difference is felt 
to be quite humiliating between the thoughts as they were 
thought, and the thoughts as they are written. Minerva spring- 
ing from the head of Jove is not more unlike the heavily-treading 
Vulcan. 

3. Necessarily, that the argument be (so to speak) complete, 
and on the wise principle that no fortresses be left untaken in the 
rear, it must be the writer’s fate to attempt a demonstration of 
the anterior probability of truths, which a child of reason can 
not only now never doubt as fact, but never could have thought 
improbable. Instance the first effort, showing it to have been 
expectable that there should, in any conceived beginning, have 
existed a Something, a Great Spirit, whom we call God. To 
have to argue of the mighty Maker, that HE was an antecedent 
probability, would appear a most needless attempt ; if it did not 
occur as the first link in a chain of arguments less open to ob- 
jection by the thoughtless. With our little light to try to prove 
a priori the dazzling mystery of a Divine Tri-unity, might (un- 
reasonably viewed) be assailed as a presumptuous and harmful 
thing; but it is our wise prerogative, if and when we can, to 
«Prove all things.’? Moreover, we live in a world wherein 
Truth’s greatest enemy is the man who shrinks from endeavoring 
at least to clear away the mists and clouds that veil her precious 
aspect ; and at a time when it behooves the reverent Christian to 
put on his panoply of faith and prayer, and meet in argument, 


AN AID TO FAITH. 11 


ee oe 
according to the grace and power given to him,—not indeed the 
blaspheming infidel, for such a foe is unreasonable and unworthy 
of an answer, but—the often candid, anxious, and involuntary 
doubter ; the mind, which, righteously vexed with the thousand 
corruptions of truth, and sorely disappointed at the conduct of its 
herd of false disciples, from a generous misconception is embra- 
cing error: the mind, never enough tenderly treated, but com- 
monly taunted as a sceptic, which yet with a natural manliness 
asserts the just prerogative of thinking for itself: fairly enough 
requiring, though rarely finding, evidence either to prop the 
weakness of a merely educational faith, or to argue away the 
objections to Christianity so rife in the clashing doctrines and 
unholy lives of its pseudo-sectaries. One of our poets hath said, 
“He has no hope who never had a fear :” it is quite as true (and 
take this saying for thy comfort, any harassed misbelieving 
mind),—He has no faith, who never had a doubt. ‘There is hope 
of a mind which doubts, because it thinks ; because it troubles 
itself to think about what the mass of nominal Christians live 
threescore years and die of very mammonism, without having had 
one earnest thought about, one difficulty, or one misgiving : there 
is hope of a man, who, not licentious nor scornful, from simple 
misconception misbelieves ; there is just and reasonable hope 
that (the misconcéption once removed) his faith will shine forth 
all the warmer for a temporary state of winter. To such do I 
address myself: not presumptuously imagining that I can satisfy 
by my poor thoughts all the doubts, cavils and objections of minds 
so keen and curious ; not affecting to sail well among the shoals 
of metaphysics, nor to plumb unerringly the deeper gulphs of 
reason ; Hut asking them for awhile to bear with me and hear 
me to the end patiently ; with me, convinced of what («a7’ &ox Iv) is 
Truth, by far surer and stronger arguments than any of the less 
considerations here expounded as auxiliary thereto; to bear 
with me, and prove for themselves at this penning of my thoughts 


12 PROBABILITIES : 


(if haply I am Helped in such high enterprise), whether indeed 
those doctrines and histories which the Christian world admit, 
were antecedently improbable, that is, unreasonable: whether, 
on the contrary, there did not exist, prior to any manifestation of 
such facts and doctrines, an exceeding likelihood that they would 
be so and so developed: and whether on the whole, led by reason 
to the threshold of faith, it may be worth while to encounter 
other arguments, which have rendered probabilities now certain. 

4. It is very material to keep in memory the only scope and 
object of this Essay. We do not pretend to add one jot of evi- 
dence, but only to prepare the mind to receive evidence : we do 
not attempt to prove facts, but only to accelerate their admission 
by the removal of prejudice. If a bedridden meteorologist is 
told that it rains, he may or he may not receive the fact from the 
force of testimony ; but he will certainly be more predisposed to 
receive it, if he finds that his weatherglass is falling rather than 
rising. The fact remains the same, it rains; but the mind,— 
precluded by circumstances from positive personal assurance of 
_such fact, and able only to arrive at truth from exterior evidence, 
—is in a fitter state for belief of the fact from being already 
made aware that it was probable. Let it not then be inferred, 
somewhat perversely, that because antecedent probabilities are 
the staple of our present argument, the theme itself, Religion, 
rests upon hypotheses so slender: it rests not at all upon such 
straws as Probabilities, but on posterior Evidences far more firm. 
What we now attempt is not to prop the ark, but favorably to 
predispose the mind of any reckless Uzzah, who might other- 
wise assail it ; not to strengthen the weak places of religion, but 
to annul such disinclination to receive Truth, as consists in pre- 
judice and misconception of its likelihood. The goodly ship is 
built upon the stocks, the platforms are reared, and the cradle is 
ready ; but mistaken preconceptions may scatter the incline with 
gravelstones rather than with grease, and thus put a needless 


AN AID TO FAITH. 13 


hindrance to the launching: whereas a clear idea that the pro- 
babilities are in favor, rather than the reverse, will make all 
smooth, lubricate, and easy. If, then, we fail in this attempt, no 
disservice whatever is done to Truth itself; no breach is made 
in the walls, no mine sprung, no battlement dismantled ; all the 
evidences remain as they were; we have taken nothing away. 
Even granting matters seemed anteriorly improbable, still, if 
evidence proved them true, such anterior unlikelihood would 
entirely be merged in the stoutly proven facts. Moreover, if we 
be adjudged to have succeeded, we have added nothing to Truth 
itself, no, nor to its outworks. That sacred temple stands com- 
plete, firm and glorious from cornerstone to topstone. We do 
but sweep away the rubbish at its base ; the drifting desert sands 
that choke its portals. We only serve that cause (a most high 
privilege), by enlisting a pre-judgment in its favor. We propose 
herein an auxiliary to evidence, not evidence itself; a fingerpost 
to point the way to faith; a little light of reason on its path. 
The risk is really nothing ; but the advantage, under Favor, may 
be much. 

5. It is impossible to elude the discussion of topics, which in 
their direct tendencies, or remoter inferences, may to the author 
at least prove dangerous or disputable ground. Ifa “ great door 
and effectual ’’ is opened to him, doubtless he will raise or meet 
with many adversaries. Besides mere haters of his creed, de- 
spisers of his arguments, and protesters loud and fierce against 
his errors; he may possibly fall foul of divers unintended here- 
sies; he may stumble unwittingly on the relics of exploded 
schisms ; he may exhume controversies in metaphysical or scho- 
lastical polemics, long and worthily extinct. If this be so, he 
can only plead, Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. 
But it is open to him also to protest against the common critical 
folly of making an offender for a word: of driving analogies on 
all four feet, and straining thoughts beyond their due proportions. 


a4 PROBABILITIES : 


Above all, never let a reader stir one inch beyond, far less 
against, his own judgment: if there seem to be sufficient reasons, 
well: if otherwise, let me walk uncompanied. The first step 
especially is felt to be avery difficult one; perhaps very de- 
batable: for aught I know, it may be merely a vain insect 
caught in the cobweb of metaphysics, soon to be destroyed, and 
easily to be discussed at leisure by some Aranean logician. 
However, it seemed to my midnight musings a probable mode of 
arriving at truth, though somewhat unsatisfactorily told from 
poverty of thought and language. Moreover it would have been, 
in such 4 priori argument, ridiculous to have commenced by 
announcing a posterior conclusion: for this cause did I do my 
humble best to work it out anew: and however supererogatory 
it may seem at first sight to the majority of readers, those keener 
minds whom I mainly address, and whose interests I wish to 
serve, will recognise the attempt as at least consistent ; and will 
be ready to admit that if the arduous effort to prove anteriorly a 
First Great Cause, and His attributes, be futile (which, however, 
I do not admit), it was an attempt unneeded on the score of its 
own merits; albeit, with an obvious somewhat of justice, pure 
reason may desire to begin at the beginning. No one, who 
thinks at all upon religion, however misbelieving, can entertain 
any mental prejudice against the Existence of a Deity, or against 
the received character of His attributes. Such a man would be 
merely in a savage state, irrational: whilst his own mind, so 
speculating, would stand itself proof positive of an Intellectual 
Father ; either immediately, as in the first man’s case, or medi- 
ately, as in our own, it must have sprung out of that Being, who 
is emphatically the Good One,—God. But if, as is possible, a 
mind, capable of thinking and keen to think on other themes, 
from any cause educational or moral, has neglected this great 
track of meditation, has “ forgotten God,’ and “had him Not in 
all his thoughts,” such an one I invite to walk with me; and, in 


AN AID TO FAITH. 15 


en ——————— 


spite of all incompleteness and insufficiency, uncaptious of much 
that may haply be fanciful or false, briefly and in outline to test 
with me sundry probabilities of the Christian scheme, considered 
antecedently to its elucidation. 


16 . PROBABILITIES: 
—— eee 


A GOD: AND HIS ATTRIBUTES. 


erent 


I witL commence with a noble, and as I believe an inspired 
sentence : than which no truth uttered by philosophers ever was 
more clearly or more sublimely expressed. “In the beginning 
was the Word: and the Word was with God ; and the Word 
was God.” In its due course, we will consider especially the 
differences between the Word, and God ; likewise the seeming 
contradiction, but true concord, of being simultaneously God, 
and with God. At present, and previously to the true com- 
mencement of our & priori thoughts, let us,.by a word or two, 
paraphrase that brief but comprehensive sentence, “In the be- 
ginning was the Word.” Eternity has no beginning, as it has 
no end: the clock of Time is futile there: it might as well 
attempt to go in vacuo. Nevertheless, in respect of finite intel- 
ligences like ourselves,’ seeing that eternity is an idea totally 
inconceivable, it is wise, nay it is only possible, to be presented 
to the mind piecemeal. Even our deepest mathematicians do 
not seruple to speak of points “infinitely remote ;” as if in that 
phrase there existed no contradiction of terms. So also, we pre- 
tend in our emptiness to talk of eternity past, time present, and 
eternity to come; the fact being that, muse as a man may, he 
can entertain no idea of an existence which is not measurable by 
time: any more than he can conceive of a color unconnected 
with the rainbow, or of a musical note beyond the seven sounds. 
The plain intention of the words is this: place the starting-post 


A GOD AND HIS ATTRIBUTES. 17 


aaa a ae nin A ee pe A acacia 
of human thought as far back into eternity as you will, 
be it what man counts a thousand ages, or ten thousand 
times ten thousand, or be these myriads multiplied again 
by millions, still, in any such Beginning, and in the begin- 
ning of all beginnings (for so must creatures talk)—Then 
was God. He Was: the scholar knows full well the force of the 
original term, the philological distinctions between e'#/ and yéyvopat: 
well pleased, he reads as of the Divinity 7», He self-existed ; and 
equally well pleased he reads of the humanity ?ysvvi@n, he was 
born. ‘The thought and phrase #1 sympathizes, if it has not an 
identity with the Hebrew’s unutterable Name. He then, whose 
title, amongst all others likewise denoting excellence supreme 
and glory underivative, is essentially “I am;” He, who 
relatively to us as to all creation else, has a new name wisely 
chosen in “the Word,”—the great expression of the idea of 
God; this mighty Intelligence is found in any such beginning 
self-existent. That teaching is a mere fact, known posteriorly 
from the proof of all things created, as well as by many wonder- 
ful signs, and the clear voice of revelation. We do not attempt 
to prove it; that were easy and obvious: but our more difficult 
endeavor at present is to show how antecedently probable it was 
that God should be: and that so being, He should be invested 
with the reasonable attributes, wherewithal we know His glori- 
ous Nature to be clothed. 

Take then our beginning where we will, there must have 
existed in that “ originally” either Something, or Nothing. It is 
a clear matter to prove, & posteriori, that Something did exist ; 
because something exists now : every matter and every derived 
spirit must have had a Father; ex nihilo nihil fit, is not more a 
truth, than that creation must have had a Creator. However, 
leaving this plain path (which I only point at by the way for 
obvious mental uses), let us now try to get at the great antecedent 
probability that in the beginning Something should have’ been, 


rather than Nothing. 


18 PROBABILITIES : 


The term, Nothing, is a fallacious one: it does not denote an 
existence, as Something does, but the end of an existence. It is 
in fact a negation, which must pre-suppose a matter once in being 
and possible to be denied; it is an abstraction, which cannot hap- 
pen unless there be somewhat to be taken away; the idea of 
vacuity must be posterior to that of fullness ; the idea of no tree 
is incompetent to be conceived without the previous idea of A 
tree; the idea of nonentity suggests, ex vi termini, a pre-existent 
entity ; the idea of Nothing, of necessity, presupposes Something. 
And a Something once having been, it would still and for ever 
continue to be, unless sufficient cause be found for its removal ; 
that cause itself, you will observe, being a Something. The 
chances are forcibly in favor of continuance, that is of perpetuity ; 
and the likelihoods proclaim loudly that there should be an Exist- 
ence. It was thus, then, antecedently more probable, than in any 
imaginable beginning from which reason can start, Something 
should be found existent, rather than Nothing. This is the first 
probability. 

Next; of what nature and extent is this Sf tbivin this Being, 
likely to be 2—There will be either one such being; or many: 
if many, the many either sprang from the one, or the mass are 
all self-existent ; in the former case, there would be a creation 
and a God: in the latter, there would be many Gods. Is the lat- 
ter antecedently more probable ?—let us see. First, it is evident 
that if many are probable, few are more probable, and one most 
probable of all. The more possible gods you take away, the 
more do impediments diminish ; until, that is to say, you arrive 
at that One Being, whom we have already proved probable. 
Moreover, many must be absolutely united as one; in which 
case the many is a gratuitous difficulty, because they may as well 
be regarded for all purposes of worship or argument as one God : 
or the many must have been in essence more or less disunited ; 
in which case, as a state of anything short of pure concord car- 


Ans OGh 


Peed OE CP NG ae a ectemticn cami” mona TN Mg: ET 4 


Et ELLE SOME RIC: 


DL IN OEIC ey ge 


A GOD-.AND HIS ATTRIBUTES. 19 


ee nee eaEE RNID 3 


ries in itself the seeds of dissolution, needs must that one or other 
of the many (long before any possible beginnings, as we count 
beginnings, looking down the past vista of eternity), would have 
taken opportunity by such disturbing causes to become absolute 
monarch: whether by peaceful persuasion, or hostile compulsion, 
or other mode of absorbing disunions, would be indifferent ; if 
they were not all improbable, as unworthy of the God. Per- 
petuity of discord is a thing impossible ; everything short of unity 
tends to decomposition. Anyhow then, given the element of 
eternity to work in, a one great Supreme Being was, in the 
created beginning, an 4 priori probability. That all other 
assumptions than that of His true and eternal Oneness are as 
false in themselves as they are derogatory to the rational views 
of deity, we all now see and believe ; but the direct proofs of this 
are more strictly matters of revelation than of reason: albeit 
reason too can discern their probabilities. Wise heathens, such 
as Socrates and Cicero, who had not our light, arrived never- 
theless at some of this perception ; and thus, through conscience 
and intelligence, became a law unto themselves: because that, 
to them, as now to any one of us who may not yet have seen the 
light, the anterior likelihood existed for only one God, rather than 
more ; a likelihood which prepares the mind to take as a funda- 
mental truth, “The Lord our God is one Jehovah.” 

Next; Self-existence: combined with unity must include the 
probable attribute, or character, Ubiquity ; as I now proceed to 
show. On_ the same principle as that by which we have seen 
Something to be likelier than Nothing, we conclude that the same 
Something is more probable to be everywhere, than the same 
Nothing (if the phrase were not absurd), to be anywhere: we 
may, so to speak, divide infinity into spaces, and prove the posi- 
tion in. each instance: moreover, as that Something is essen- 
tially—not a unit as of many, but—unity involving all, it follows 
as most probable that this Whole Being should be ubiquitous ; in 


20 PROBABILITIES : 


other parlance, that the one God should be everywhere at once: 
also, there being no limit to what we call Space, nor any imagina- 
ble hostile power to place a constraint upon the One Great Being, 
this Whole Being must be ubiquitous to a degree strictly infinite : 
‘HE is in every place, beholding the evil and the good.” 

Such a consideration (and it is a perfectly true one) renders 
necessary the next point, to wit, that God is a Spirit. No pos- 
sible substance can be everywhere at once: essence may, but 
not substance. Corporeity in any shape must be local ; local is 
finite ; and we have just proved the anterior probability of a One 
great Existence being (notwithstanding unity of essence) infinite. 
Hllocal and infinite are convertible terms: spirit is illocal; and, 
as God is infinite, that is, illocal ; it is clear that “God is a 
Spirit.” ; 

We have thus (not attempting to build up faith by such slight 
tools, but only using them to cut away prejudice) arrived at the 
high probability of a God invested with His natural qualities or 
attributes ; Self existence, Unity, the faculty of being every- 
where at once and that everywhere Infinitude ; and essentially 
of a Spiritual nature, not material. His moral, or accidental 
attributes (so to speak), were, antecedently to their expression, 
equally easy of being proved probable. First, with respect to 
Power: given no disturbing cause—(we shall soon consider the 
question of permitted evil, and its origin ; but this, however dis- 
turbing to creatures, will be found not only none to God, but, as 
it were; only a ray of His glory suffered to be broken for pris- 
matic beauty’s sake, a flash of the direction of His energies suf. 
fered to be diverted for the superior triumph of good in that day 
when it shall be shown that “God hath made all things for him- 
self, yea, even the wicked for the time of visitation ”)—with the 
datum then of no disturbing cause obstructing or opposing, an 
infinite being must be able to do all things within the sphere of 
such infinity ; in other phrase, He must be all-powerful. Just 


A GOD AND HIS ATTRIBUTES. 21 


AR eee PL TANT 2. Nahe AEE RS eT re 
so, an impetus in vacuity suffers no check, but ever sails along 
among the fleet of worlds ; and the innate Impulse of the Deity 
-must expand and energize throughout that infinitude, Himself. 
For a like reason of ubiquity, God must know all things: it is 
impossible to escape from the strong likelihood that any intelli- 
gent being must be conversant of what is going on under his 
very eye. Again; in the case both of Power and Knowledge, 
alike with the coming attributes of Goodness and Wisdom—(wis- 
dom considered as morally distinct from mere knowledge or 
awaredness ; it being quite possible to conceive a cold eye see- 
ing all things heedlessly, and a clear mind knowing all things 
heartlessly )—in the case, I say, of all these accidental attributes, 
there recurs for argument, one analogous to that by which we 
showed the anterior probability of a self-existence. Things posi- 
tive must precede things negative. Sight must have been, before 
blindness is possible ; and before we can arrive at a just idea of 
no sight. Power must be precursor to an abstraction from power, 
or weakness. The minor-existence of ignorance is an impossi- 
bility, unless you pre-allow the major-existence of wisdom ; for 
it amounts to a debasing or a diminution of wisdom. Sin is well 
defined to be, the transgression of law; for without law there 
can be no sin. So also, without wisdom there can be no igno- 
rance ; without power, there can be no weakness ; without good- 
ness, there can be no evil. 

Furthermore. An aflirmative, such as wisdom, power, good- 
ness, can exist absolutely ; it is in the nature of a Something: 
but a negative, such as ignorance, weakness, evil, can only exist 
relatively ; and it would, indeed, be a Nothing, were it not for 
the previous and now simultancous existence of its wiser, stron- 
ger, and better origin. Abstract evil is as demonstrably an im- 
possibility as abstract ignorance, or abstract weakness. If evil 
could have self-existed, it would in the moment of its eternal 
birth have demolished itself. Virtue’s intrinsic concord-tends to » 


22 PROBABILITIES: 


perpetual being: vice’s innate discord struggles always with a 
force towards dissolution. Goodness, wisdom, power have exist- 
ences, and have had existences from all eternity, though gulphed - 
within the Godhead ; and that, whether evidenced in act or not: 
but their corruptions have had no such original existence, but 
are only the same entities perverted. Love would be love still, 
though there were no existent object for its exercise: Beauty 
would be beauty still, though there were no created thing to 
illustrate its fairness: Power would be power still, though there 
be no foe to combat, no difficulty to be overcome. Hatred, ill- 
favor, weakness are only perversions or diminutions of these. 
Power exists independently of muscles or swords or screws or 
levers ; love, independently of kind thoughts, words, and actions ; 
beauty, independently of colors, shapes, and adaptations. Just 
so is Wisdom philosophically spoken of by a truly Royal and 
noble author : 

“ ], wisdom dwell with prudence, and find out the knowledge 
of clever inventions. Counsel is mine, and sound wisdom; I am 
understanding ; I have strength. The Lord possessed me in the 
beginning of his way, before his works of old. I was set up 
from everlasting, from the beginning, or ever the earth was. 
When there were no depths, I was brought forth; before the 
mountains were fixed, or the hills were made.- When He pre- 
pared the heavens, I was there ; when he set a compass upon the 
face of the depth ; when he established the clouds above ; when 
he strengthened the foundations of the deep: Then was I by him, 
as one brought up with him: and I was daily his delight, rejoic- 
ing always before him; rejoicing in the habitable parts of his 
earth ; and my delights were with the sons of men.” 

King Solomon well knew of Whom he wrote thus nobly. 
Eternal wisdom, power, and goodness, all prospectively thus 
yearning upon man, and incorporate in One, whose name, among 
his many names, is Wisdom. Wisdom, as a quality, existed 


A GOD AND HIS ATTRIBUTES. 23 


will i i i a pet ict tn ol ee, 
with God; and constituting full pervasion of his essence, was 
God. . 

But to return, and bind to a conclusion our ravelled thoughts. 
As, originally, the self-existent Being, unbounded, all-knowing, 
might take up, so to speak, if He willed, these ete~nal affirmative 
excellences of wisdom, power and goodness; and as these, to 
every rational apprehension, are highly worthy of his choice, 
whereas their derivative and inferior corruptions would have 
been most derogatory to any reasonable estimate of His charac- 
ter; how much more likely was it that He should prefer the 
higher rather than the lower, should take the affirmative before 
the negative, should “choose the good and refuse the evil,’”’— 
than endure to be endowed with such garbled, demoralizing, finite » 
attributes as those wherewith the heathen painted their Pantheon. 
What high antecedent probability was there, that if a God should 
be (and this we have proved highly probable too),—He should be 
One, ubiquitous, self-existent, spiritual: that He should be all- 
mighty, all-wise, and all-good. 


24 ; PROBABILITIES : 


THE TRIUNITY. 


ANOTHER deep and inscrutable topic is now to engage our 
thoughts,—the mystery of a probable Triunity. While we 
touch on such high themes, the Christian’s presumption ever is, 
that he himself approaches them with reverence and prayer ; 
and that, in the case of an unbeliever, any such mind will be 
courteous enough to his friendly opponent, and wise enough 
respecting his own interest and safety lest these things be true, 
to enter upon all such subjects with the seriousness befitting their 
importance, and with the restraining thought that in fact they 
may be sacred. 

Let us then consider, antecedently to all experience, with what 
sort of deity pure reason would have been satisfied. It has 
already arrived at Unity, and the foregoing attributes. But 
what kind of Unity is probable? Unity of Person, or unity of 
Essence? A sterile solitariness, easily understandable, and pre- 
sumably incommunicative ? or an absolute oneness, which yet 
relatively involves several mysterious phases of its own expan- 
sive love? Will you think it a foregone conclusion, if [ assert 
the superior likelihoods of the latter, and not of the former? Let 
us come then to a few of many reasons. First: it was by no 
means probable to be supposed anteriorly, that the God should 
be clearly comprehensible: yet he must be one: and oneness is 
the idea most easily apprehended of all possible ideas. The 
meanest of intellectual creatures could comprehend his Maker, 


THE TRIUNITY. 25 


and in so far top his heights, if God, being truly one in one 
view, were yet only one in every view: if, that is to say, there 
existed no mystery incidental to his nature: nay, if that mystery 
did not amount to the difficulty of a seeming contradiction. I 
judge it likely, and with confidence, that Reason would prere- 
quire for his God, a Being, at once infinitely easy to be appre- 
hended by the lowest of His spiritual children, and infinitely 
difficult to be comprehended by the highest of His seraphim. 
Now, there can be guessed only two ways of compassing such a 
prerequirement: one, a moral way; such as inventing a deity 
who could be at once just and unjust, everywhere and nowhere, 
good and evil, powerful and weak ; this is the heathen phase of 
Numen’s character, and is cbviously most objectionable in every 
point of view: the other would be a physical way ; such as re- 
quiring a God who should be at once material and immaterial, 
abstraction and conerction ; or, for a still more confounding para- 
dox to Reason (considered as antagonist to Faith, in lieu of being 
strictly its ally), and arithmetical contradiction, an algebraic 
mystery, such as would be included in the idea of Composite 
Unity; one involving many, and many collapsed into one. 
Some such enigma was probable in reason’s guess at the nature 
of his God. It is the Christian way ; and one entirely unobjec- 
tionable: because it is the only insuperable. difficulty as to His 
Nature which'does not debase the notion of Divinity. But there 
are also other considerations. 

For, secondly. ‘The self-existent One is endowed, as we found 
probable, with abundant loving-kindness, goodness overflowing 
and perpetual. Is it reasonable to conceive that such a charac- 
ter could for a moment be satisfied with absolute solitariness ? 
that infinite benevolence should, in any possible beginning, be 
discovered existent in a sort of selfish only-oneness? Such a 
supposition is, to the eye of even unenlightened’ reason, so clearly 
a reductio ad absurdum, that men in all countries and ages have 


2 


26 PROBABILITIES : 


joes: Oldies hie A 
been driven to invent a plurality of gods, for very society sake : 
and I know not but that they are anteriorly wiser and more ra- 
tional, than the man who believes in a Benevolent Existence 
eternally one and no otherwise than one. Let me not be mis- 
taken to imply that there was any likelihood of many coexistent 
gods: that was a reasonable improbability, as we have already 
seen, perhaps a spiritual impossibility : but the anterior likelihood 
of which I speak goes to show, that in One God there should be 
more than one co-existence: each, by arithmetical mystery but 
not absurdity, pervading all, co-equals, each being God, and yet 
not three Gods but one God. ‘That there should be a rational 
difficulty here,—or, rather, an irrational one,—I have shown to be 
Reason’s pre-requirement: and if such an one as I, or any other 
creature, could now and here (aye, or anywhen or anywhere, 
in the heights of highest heaven, and the far-stretching distance 
of eternity) solve such intrinsic difficulty, it would demonstrably 
be one not worthy of its source, the wise design of God: it 
would prove that riddle read, which uncreate omniscience pro- 
pounded for the baffling of the creature mind. No. It is far 
more reasonable, as well as far more reverent, to acquiesce in 
Mystery, as another attribute inseparable from the nature of the 
Godhead ; than to quibble about numerical puzzles, and indulge 
unwisely in objections which it is the happy state of nobler intel- 
ligences than man on earth is, to look into with desire, and to 
exercise withal their keen and lofty minds. 

But we have not yet done. Some further thoughts remain to 
be thrown out in the third place, as to the preconceivable fitness 
or propriety of that Holy Union, which we call the trinity of 
Persons who constitute the Selfexistent One. If God, being one 
in one sense, is yet likely to appear, humanly speaking, more 
than one in another sense; we have to inquire anteriorly of the 
probable nature of such other intimate Being or Beings; as also, 
whether such addition to essential oneness is likely itself to be 


THE TRIUNITY. 27 


more than one or only one. As to the former of these ques- 
tions: if, according to the presumption of reason (and according 
also to what we have since learnt from revelation; but there 
may be good policy in not dotting this book with chapter and 
verse),—if the Deity thus loved to multiply Himself; then He, 
to whom there can exist no beginning, must have so loved, so 
determined, and so done from all eternity. Now, any conceiv- 
able creation, however originated, must have had a beginning, 
place it as far back as you will. In any succession of numbers, 
however infinitely they may stretch, the commencement at least 
is a fixed point, one. But, this multiplication of Deity, this com- 
plex simplicity, this intricate easiness, this obvious paradox, this 
subdivision and conaddition of a One, must have taken place, 
so soon as ever eternal benevolence found itself alone ; that is, 
in eternity, and not in any imaginable time. So then, the Being 
or Beings would probably not have been creative, but of the 
essence of Deity. Take also for an additional argument, that it 
is an idea which detracts from every just estimate of the infinite 
and allwise God to suppose He should take creatures into his 
eternal counsels, or consort, so to speak, familiarly with other 
than the united subdivisions, persons, and coequals of Himself. 
It was reasonable to prejudge that the everlasting companions of 
Benevolent Gqd, should also be God. And thus, it appears 
antecedently probable that (what from the poverty of language 
we must call) the multiplication of the one God should not have 
been created beings; that is, should have been divine; a term, 
which includes as of right, the attribution to each such Holy 
Person, of all the wondrous characteristics of the Godhead. 
Again: as to the latter question; was it probable that such 
so-called subdivisions should be two, or three, or how many? [ 
do not think it will be wise to insist upon any such arithmetical 
curiosity as a perfect number; nor on such a toy as an equi- 
lateral triangle and its properties; nor on the peculiar aptitude 


28 PROBABILITIES : 


des Ticgle nett hehe cas ee 
for subdivision in everything, to be discerned in a beginning, a 
middle, and an end; nor in the consideration that every fact had 
a cause, is a constancy, and produces a consequence : neither, 
to draw any inferences from the social maxim that for counsel, 
companionship, and conversation, the number three has some 
special fitness. Some other similar fancies, not altogether value- 
less, might be alluded to. It seems preferable, however, on so 
grand a theme, to attempt a deeper dive, and a higher flight. 
We would then, reverently as always, albeit equally as always 
with the freeborn boldness of God’s intellectual children, attempt 
to prejudge how many, and with what distinctive marks, the 
Holy Beings into whom (és zxos einéwv) God, for very Benevolence 
sake, pours out Essential Unity, were likely to be. | 

Let us consider what principles, as in the case of a forthcoming 
creation, would probably be found in action, to influence such 
creation’s Author. 

First of all, there would be Will, a will energized by love, 
disposing to create: a phase of Deity aptly and comprehensively 
typified to all minds by the name of a universal Father: this 
would be the primary impersonation of God. And is it not so ? 

Secondly, there would be (with especial reference to that idea 
of creation which doubtless at most remote beginnings occupied 
the Good One’s contemplation), there would be next, I repeat, 
in remarkable adaptation to all such benevolent views, the great 
idea or principle, Obedience ; conforming toa Father’s righteous 
laws, acquiescing in his just will, and returning love for love: 
such a phase could not be better shadowed out to creatures than 
by an Eternal Son ; the dutiful yet supreme, the subordinate yet 
coequal, the amiable yet exalted Avatar of our God. This was 
probable to have been the second impersonation of Deity. And 
is it not so ? 

Thirdly ; Springing from the conjoint ideas of the Father and 
the Son, and with similar prospection to such instantly creative 


THE TRIUNITY. 29 


zniverse, there would occur the grand idea of Generation ; the 
mighty coequal, pure, and quickening Impulse : aptly announced 
to men and angels as the Holy Spirit. This was to have been 
the third impersonation of Divinity. And is it not so ? 

Of all these—under illumination of the foreknown fact, I 
speak, in their aspect of anterior probability. With respect to 
more possible Persons, I at least cannot invent one. There is, 
to my reflection, neither need nor fitness for a fourth, or any 
further Principle. If another can, let him look well that he be 
not irrationally demolishing an attribute and setting it up as a 
principle. Obedience is not an attribute ; nor Generation ; nor 
Will: whilst the attribute of Love, pervading all, sets these only 
possible three Principles going together as One in a mysterious 
harmony. I would not be misunderstood ; persons are not prin- 
ciples ; but principles may be illustrated and incorporative in 
persons. Essential Love, working distinctively throughout the 
Three, unites them instinctively as One: even as the attribute 
Wisdom designs, and the attribute Power arranges all the scheme 
of Godhead. 

And now I ask Reason, whether, presupposing keenness, he 
might not have arrived by calculation of probabilities at the 
likelihood of these great doctrines : that the nature of God would 
be an apparent contradiction : that such contradiction should not 
be moral, but physical; or rather verging towards the meta- 
physical, as immaterial and more profound: that God, being 
One, should yet, in his great Love, marvellously have been com- 
panioned from eternity by Himself: and that such Holy and 
United Confraternity should be so wisely contrived as to serve 
for the bright unapproachable exemplar of love, obedience, and 
generation to all the future universe, such Triunity Itself existing 
uncreated. 


30 PROBABILITIES : 


cemeeresrenssescestnapeeesi nts sng oA LS, 


THE GODHEAD VISIBLE. 


We have hitherto mused on the Divinity, as on Spirit invested 
with attributes: and this idea of His nature was enough for all 
requirements antecedently to a creation. At whatever beginning 
we may suppose such creation to have commenced, whether 
countless ages before our present «ésyos, or only a sufficient time 
to have prepared the crust of earth ; and to whatever extent we 
may imagine creation to have spread, whether in those remote 
periods originally to our system alone and at after eras to its 
accompanying stars and galaxies and firmaments; or at one and 
the same moment to have poured material existence over space 
to which our heavens are as nothing: whatever, and whenever, 
and wherever creation took place, it would appear to be probable 
that some one person of the Deity should, in a sort, become more 
or less concretely manifested ; that is, in a greater or a minor 
degree to such created minds and senses visible. Moreover, for 
purposes at least of a concentrated worship of such creatures, 
that He should occasionally, or perhaps habitually, appear local. 
I mean, that the King of all spiritual potentates and the subordi- 
nate Excellences of brighter worlds than ours, the Sovereign of 
those whom we call angels, should will to be better known to and 
more aptly conceived by such His admiring creatures, in some 
usual glorious form, and some wonted sacred place. Not that 
any should see God, as purely God; but, as God relatively to 


THE GODHEAD VISIBLE. 31 


al een. iene eg ee i. aaa ete oe 
them, in the capacity of King, Creator, and the Object of all 
reasonable worship. -It seems anteriorly probable that one at 
least of the Persons in the Godhead should for this purpose assume 
a visibility: and should hold His court of adoration in some 
central world, such as now we call indefinitely Heaven. That 
such probability did exist in the human forecast, as concerns a 
heaven and the form of God, let the testimony of all nations now 
be admitted to corroborate. Every shape from a cloud to a 
crocodile, and every place from AZther to Tartarus, have been 
peopled by man’s not quite irrational device with their so-called 
gods. But we must not lapse into the after argument : previous 
likelihood is our harder theme. Neither, in this section, will 
we attempt the probabilities of the place of heaven: that will be 
found at a more distant page. We have here to speak of the 
antecedent credibility that there should be some visible phase of 
God ; and of the shape wherein He would be most likely, as soon 
as a creation was, to appear to such his creatures. With respect, 
then, to the former. Creatures, being finite, can only compre- 
hend the infinite in his attribute of unity: the other attributes 
being apprehended (or comprehended partially) in finite phases. 
But, unity being a purely intellectual thought, one high and dry 
beyond the moral feelings, involves none of the requisites of a 
spiritual, that is an affectionate, worship: such worship as it was 
likely that a beneficent Being would, for his creatures’ own 
elevation in happiness, command and inspire towards Himself. 
In order, therefore, to such worship and such inspiration acting 
through reason, it would appear fitting that the Deity should 
manifest Himself especially with reference to that heavenly 
Exemplar, the Three Divine Persons of the One Supreme 
Essence already shown to have been probable. And it seems 
likeliest and discreetest to my thinking, that, with this view, the 
secondary phase, loving Obedience, under the dictate of the pri- 
mary phase, a loving Will, and energized by the tertiary or 


32 PROBABILITIES : 


conjoining phase a loving Quickening Entity, should assume the 
visible type of Godhead, and thus concentrate unto Himself the 
worship of all worlds. I can conceive no scheme more simply 
profound, more admirably suited to its complex purposes, than 
that He, in whom dwelt the fulness of the Godhead, bodily, should 
take the form of God, in order that unto Him every knee should 
bow, of things in heaven, and things in earth, and things in re- 
gions under the earth. Was not all this reasonably to have been 
looked for? and tested afterwards by Scripture, in its frequent 
allusions to some visible phase of Deity, when the Lord God 
walked with Adam, and Enoch, and Abraham, and Peter, and 
James, and John,—I ask, is it not the case ? 

The latter point remaining to be thus briefly touched upon, 
respects the probable shape to be assumed and worn, familiarly 
enough to be recognised as His, by Deity thus vouchsafing Him- 
self visible. And here we must look down the forward stream 
of Time and search among the creatures whom thereafter God 
should make, to arrive at some good reason for, some antecedent 
probability of, the form which He should thus frequently inhabit. 
Fire, for example, a pure and spirit-like nature, would not have 
been a guess unworthy of reason: but this, besides its humbler 
economic uses, would endanger an idolatry of the natural 
emblem. So also would light be no irrational thought. And it 
is true that God might, and probably would, invest Himself in 
one or both of these pure essences, so seemingly congenial to a 
nature higher than ours: but then there would be some nucleus 
to the brilliancy and the burning; these would be as a veil to 
the Divinity ; we should have need, before He were truly visible, 
that the veil were laid aside: we should have to shred away to 
the nucleus, which (and not the fire or light) would be the Form 
of God. Similar objections, in themselves or in their idolatrizing 
tendencies, would lie against any such shape as a cloud, ora 
rainbow, or an angel (whatever such a being may resemble), or 


THE GODHEAD VISIBLE. 33 


in fact any other conceivable creature, whether good as the 
angelic case or indifferent as that of the cloud, which the Deity, 
though assuming often, would nevertheless in every instance 
assume in conjunction with such his ordinary creature, and could 
not entirely monopolize. I mean; if God had the shape of a 
cloud, or of a rainbow, common clouds and rainbows would come 
to be thought gods too. Reason would anticipate this objection 
to such created and too-favored shapes: more; in every case, 
but one, he would be quite at a loss to look for some type, clearly 
apt and probable. That one case he might discern to be this. 
Known unto God are all things from the beginning to the end : 
and, in His foreknowledge, Reason might have been enlightened 
to prophesy (as we shall hereafter see) that for certain wise and 
good ends one great family out of the myriads who rejoice in being 
called God’s children, would in a most marked manner fall away 
from Him through disobedience ; and should thereby earn, if not 
the annihilation of their being, at least its endless separation from 
the Blessed. Manifestly, the wisdom and benevolence of God 
would be eager and swift to devise a plan for the redemption of 
so lost a race. Why He should permit their fall at all will be 
reverentially descanted on in its proper section : meanwhile, how 
is it probable that God, first, by any theory consistently with 
truth and justice, could, and next by power and contrivance 
actually would, lift up again this sinful family from the pit of 
condemnation? Reason is to search the question well: and after 
much thought, you will arrive at the truth that there was but one 
way probable. Rebellion against the Great and Self-existent 
Author of all things, must needfully involve infinite punishment ; 
if only because He is infinite, and his laws of an eternal sanc- 
tion. The problem then was, how to inflict the unbounded 
punishment thus claimed by justice for a transgressional condi- 
tion, and yet at love’s demand to set the prisoner free : how to 
be just, and simultaneously justifier of the guilty. That was a. 


Q* 


34 PROBABILITIES : 


ek papain TREE ee) Ae eee oer 
question magnificently solved by God alone : magnificently about 
to be solved, as according to our argument seemed probable, by 
God Triune, in wondrous self-involving council. The solution 
would be rationally this. Himself in his character of filial 
obedience, should pay the utter penalty to Himself in his charac- 
ter of paternal authority, whilst Himself in the character of 
quickening spirit, should restore the ransomed family from death 
to life, from the power of evil unto good. Was not this a most 
probable, a most reasonably probable scheme? was it not 
altogether wise and philosophical, as well as entirely generous 
and kind to wretched men ? 

And (returning to our present topic), was it not antecedently 
to have been expected that God the Son (so to put it) should, in 
the shape He was thereafter to assume upon earth, appear upon 
the eternal throne of heaven? In a shape, however glorified 
and etherealized, with glistening countenance and raiment bright 
as the light, nevertheless resembling that more humble form, 
the Son of Man, who was afterwards thus by a circle of proba- 
bilities to be made in the form of God; in a shape, not liable, 
from its very sinfulness, to the deification either of other worlds 
or of this [hero-worship is another and a lower thing altogether ; 
we speak here of true idolatries :}—was it unlikely I say that in 
such a shape Deity should have deigned to become visible, and 
have blazed Manifested God, the central Sun of Heaven ?—This 
probability, prior to our forthflowing thoughts on the Incarnation, 
though in some measure anticipating them, will receive further 
light from the views soon to be set forth. I know not but that 
something is additionally due to the suggestion following ; namely ; 
that, raise our swift imagination to what height we may, and 
stretch our searching reason to the uttermost, we cannot, despite 
of all inventive energies and powers of mind, conceive any shape 
more beautiful, more noble, more worthy for a rational intelli- 
gence to dwell in, more in one Homeric word ésoadis, than the 


THE GODHEAD VISIBLE. 35 


glorified and etherealized human form divine. Let this serve as 
reason’s short reply to any charge of anthropomorphism in the 
doctrines of his creed: it was probable that God should be 
revealed to His creation; and as to the form of any such 
revealed essence in any such infinite beginnings of His work, 
the most likely of all would appear to be that one, wherein He, 
in the ages then to come, was well resolved to earn the most 
glorious of all triumphs, the merciful reconciliation of everlast- 
ing justice with everlasting love, the wise and wondrous scheme 
of God forgiving sinners. | 


36 PROBABILITIES : 


THE ORIGIN OF EVIL. 


Ir will now be opportune to attempt elucidation of one of the 
darkest and deepest riddles ever propounded to the finite under- 
standing ; the 4 priori likelihood of evil: not, mind, its eternal 
existence, which is a false doctrine ; but its probable procession 
from the earliest created beings ; which is a true one. 

At first sight, nothing could appear more improbable: nothing 
more inconsistent with the recognised attributes of God, than 
that error, pain, and sorrow should be mingled in His works. 
These the spontaneous offspring of His love, one might (not all 
wisely) argue, must always be good and. happy,—because 
perfect as Himself. Because perfect ?—therein lies the fallacy, 
which reason will at once lay bare. Perfection is attributable to 
no possible creature: perfection argues infinity, and infinity is 
one of the prerogatives of God. However good, “ very good,” a 
creation may be found, still it must, from essential finitude, fall 
short of that Best, which is in effect the only state purely unex- 
ceptionable. For instance, no creature can be imagined of a 
wisdom undiminished from the single true Standard, God’s wis- 
dom: in other phrase, every creature must be more or less 
departed from wisdom, that is, verging towards folly. Again; 
no creature can be presumed of a purity so spotless as to rank in 
an equality with that of the Almighty: in other words, neither 
man, nor angel, nor any other creature can exist who is not more 
or less—I will not say impure, positively, but unpure negatively. 


THE ORIGIN OF EVIL. 37 


Thus, the birthmark of creation must have been an inclination 
towards folly, and from purity. The mere idea of creatures 
would involve, as its great need-be, the qualifying clause that 
these emanations from perfection be imperfect; and that these 
children of purity be liable to grow unpure. They must either 
be thus natured, or exist of the essence of God, that is, be other 
persons and phases of the Deity: such a case was possible cer- 
tainly ; but as we have already shown not probable. And it 
were possible, that, in consequence of some redemption such as 
we have spoken of, creatures might by ingraftation into God 
become so entirely part of Him, bone of bone and flesh of flesh 
and spirit of spirit, that an exhortation to such blest beings should 
reasonably run, “Be ye perfect.’ But this infinite munificence 
of the Godhead in redemption was not to be found among His 
bounties as Creator. It might indeed arise afterwards, as setting 
up again the fallen creature in some safe niche of Deity: and 
we now know it has arisen: “ we are complete in Him.” 

But this, though relevant, is a digression. Returning, and to 
produce some further argument against all creature perfectness ; 
let us consider how rational it seems to presuppose that the 
mighty Maker in his boundless love should have willed to form 
a long chain of classes of existence more and more subordinated 
each to the other, each good of its kind and happy in its way, but 
yet all needfully more or less removed from the high standard 
of uncreate Perfection. These descending links, these gradua- 
tions downwards, must involve a nearer or remoter approach to 
evil. Now, we must bear in mind that Evil is not a principle, 
but a perversion : it amounts merely to a denial, a limitation, a 
corruption of good, not to the dignity of its abstract antagonism. 
Familiarly, but fallaciously, we talk of the evil principle, the 
contradictory to good: we might as well talk of the nosologic 
principle, the contradictory to health ; or the darkness principle, 
the contradictory to light. ‘They are contraries, but not contra- 


33 PROBABILITIES: 


al a i I NC in eR re eee 
dictories: they have no positive but only a relative existence. 
Good and evil are verily foes, but originally there was one 
cemented friendship: slender beginnings consequent on a crea- 
tion, began to cause the breach : the civil war arose out of a state 
of primitive peace: images betray us into errors, or I might add 
with a protest against the risk of being misinterpreted, that lilee 
brothers turned to a deadly hate, they nevertheless sprang not 
originally out of two hostile and opposite hemispheres, but from 
one paternal hearth. Not however in any sense that God is the 
author of evil; but that God’s workmanship the finite creature 
needfully perverted good. 

The origin of evil, that is, its birth, is a term true and clear: 
original evil, that is, giving it no birth but an antedate to all cre- 
ated things, suffering it to run parallel with God and good from 
all eternity, this is a term false and misty. The probability that 
good would be warped and grow deteriorate ; that wisdom would 
be dwindled down into less and less wisdom, or foolishness ; and 
power degenerated more and more towards imbecility ; must 
arise, directly a creature should spring out of the Creator ; and 
that, let astronomy or geology name any date they will: Adam 
is a definite date ; perhaps also the first day’s—or period’s— 
work: but the Beginning of Creation is undated. It would 
then, under this impression of the necessary defalcation of the 
creature from the strict straight line, be rational to look for devi- 
ations: it would be rational to presuppose that God, just and 
good and pure and wise, should righteously be able to “charge 
His angels with folly,” should verily declare that “ the heavens 
are not pure in His sight.” 

Further ; it would be a possible chance (which considerations 
soon succeeding would render even probable) that for a wise 
humiliation of the reasoning creature, and a just exaltation of the 
only Source of life and light and all things, one or more of such 
first created beings, or angels, should be suffered to fall, possibly 


THE ORIGIN OF EVIL. 39 


a 


from the vastest height and at first by the slenderest beginnings, 
lower and lower into folly, impurity, and all other derelictions 
from the excellence of God. The lines, once unparalleled, 
would, without a check, go further apart for all eternity ; albeit 
the primal deviation arose in time. The aerolite, dropping 
slowly at first, increases in swiftness as it multiplies the fathoms 
of descent : and if the abyss be really bottomless, how impossible 
a check or a return. 

Some such terrible exdmple would amount to a reasonable 
likelihood, if only for a lesson and a warning: to all intelligent 
hierarchs, be not high-minded, but fear; to all responsible 
beings, keep righteousness and reverence, and tempt not God ; 
to all the Virtues, Dominations, Obediences, and due Subordina- 
tions of unknown glorious worlds, a loud and living exhortation 
to exercise and not to let grow dim their spiritual energies, in 
efforts after goodness, wisdom, and purity. A creature state, to 
be happy, must be a progressive state : the capability of progres- 
sion argues lack, or a tendency from good: and progression: it- 
self needs a spur, lest indolence relapse towards evil. 

Additionally ; we must remember that a creature’s excellence 
before God is the reasonable service which he freely renders : 
freedom, dangerous prerogative, involves choice: and choice 
necessitates the possibility of error. The command to a rational 
intelligence would be, do this, and live; do it not, and die: if 
thou doest, it is well done, good and faithful servant; thou hast 
mounted by thine own heaven-blest exertions to a higher ap- 
proach towards infinite perfection ; enter thou into the joy, not 
merely of a creature, but of thy Lord. But, if thou doest not, 
it is woe to thee, unworthy hireling; thou hast broken the tie 
that bound thee to thy Maker, obedience, the root of happiness ; 
thou livest on indeed, because the Former of all things cancel- 
leth not nor endeth his beginning ; but henceforth thine exist- 
ence is, as a river which earthquakes have divorced from its bed, - 


40° ~ PROBABILITIES : 


and instead of flowing on for ever through the fair pastures of | 
peace and among the mountain roots of everlasting righteousness, 
thy downward course is shattery, headlong, turbulent, and de- 
structive ; black-throated whirlpools here, miasmatic marshes 
there, a cataract, a shoal, a rapid ; until the remorseless stream, 
lashing among rocks which its own riot rendered sterile, pours 
its unresting waters into the thirsty sands of the Sahara. 

It was indeed probable (as since we know it to be true) that 
the generous Giver of all things would in the vast majority of 
cases minister such secret help to His weaker spiritual children, 
that, far from failing of continuous obedience, they should find it 
so unceasingly easier and happier that their very natures would 
soon come to be imbued with that pervading habit: and that 
thus, the longer any creature stood upright, the stronger should 
he rest in righteousness; until, at no very distant period, it 
should become morally impossible for him to fall. Such would 
soon be the condition of myriads, perhaps almost the whole, of 
heaven’s innumerable host: and with respect’ to any darker Unit 
in that multitude, for the good of all permitted to make early 
shipwreck of himself, simply by leaving his intelligence to plume 
its wings into presumptuous flight, and by allowing his pristine 
goodness or wisdom to ‘grow rusty from non-usage until that 
sacred panoply were eaten into holes; with respect to any such 
unhappy one and all others (if others be) who should listen to 
his glozing, and make a comnion cause in his rebellion, where, I 
ask, is any injustice, or even unkindness done to him by Deity ? 
Where is any moral improbability that such a traitor should be ; 
or any just inconsistency chargeable on the attributes of God in 
consequence of such his being ?. Whom can he in reason accuse 
but himself for what he is? And what misery can such an one 
complain of, which is not the work of his own hands? And’ lest 
the Great Offender should urge against his God, why didst thou 
make me thus ?—Is not the answer obvious, I made thee; but 


THE ORIGIN OF EVIL. 41 


not thus. And on the rejoinder, Why didst thou not keep me 
thou madest me ? Is not the reply iust, [ made thee reasonable, I 
led thee to the starting place, I taught thee and set thee going well 
in the beginning ; thou art intelligent and free, and hast capaci- 
ties of Mine own giving: wherefore didst thou throw aside My 
srace, and fly in the face of thy Creator ? 

On the whole; consider that I speak only of probabilities. 
There is a depth in this abyss of thought, which no human plum- 
met is long enough to sound; there is a maze in this labyrinth to 
be tracked by no mortal clue. It involves the truth, How un- 
searchable are His judgments: Thou hidest Thy ways in the sea, 
and thy paths in the deep waters, and Thy footsteps are not 
known. The weak point of man’s argument lies in the suggest- 
ed recollection, that doubtless the Deity could, if He would, 
have upheld all the Universe from falling by his gracious power ; 
and that the attribute of Love concludes that so He would. 
However, these three brief considerations further will go some 
way to solve the difficulty, and to strengthen the weak point ; 
first, there are other attributes besides Love to run concurrently 
with it, as Truth, Justice, and unchangeableness :—Secondly, 
that grace is not grace if manifested indiscriminately to all: and 
thirdly, that to our understanding at least there was no possible 
method of illustrating the amiabilities of Goodness, and the con- 
trivances of Wisdom, but by the infused permission of some 
physical and moral evils: Mercy, benevolence, design, would in 
a universe of best have nothing to do; that universe itself would 
grow stagnant, as incapable of progress ; and the principal record 
of God’s excellences, the book of redemption, would have been 
unwritten. Is not then the existence of evil justified in reason’s 
calculation 2 and was not such existence an antecedent proba- 
bility ? 

Of these matters, thus curtly: it is time, in a short recapitu- 
latino. to reflect, that, from foregoing causes, mysteries were 


42 PROBABILITIES : 


probable around the throne of heaven: and, as I have attempted 
to show, the mystery of imperfection, a concrete not an abstract, 
was likely to have sprung out of any creature universe. Reason 
perceives that a Gordian knot was likely to have become en- 
tangled; in the intricate complexities of abounding good to be 
mingled needfully with its own deficiencies, corruptions, and 
perversions: and this having been shown by Reason as anterior- 
ly probable, its difficult involvements are now since cut by the 


sword of conquering Faith. 


COSMOGONY. 43 


COSMOGONY. 


Turse deep themes having been descanted on, however from 
their nature unsatisfactorily and with whatever human weakness, 
let us now endeavor mentally to transport ourselves to a period 
immediately antecedent to our own world’s birth. We should 
then have been made aware that a great event was about to take 
place; whereat, from its foreseen consequences, the hierarchies 
of heaven would be prompt to shout for joy, and the holy ones 
of God to sing for gratitude. It was no common ease of a 
creation; no merely one more orb, of third rate unimportance, 
amongst the million others of higher and more glorious praise : 
but it was a globe and a race about to be unique in character 
and fate, and in the far spread results of their existence. On it 
and of its family was to be contrived the scene, wherein, to the 
admiration of the universe, God himself in Person was going 
visibly to make head against corruption in creation, and for ever 
thus to quench that possibility again: wherein He was marvel- 
lously to invent and demonstrate how Mercy and Truth should 
meet together, how Righteousness and Peace should kiss each 
other. There, was going to be set forth the wonderfully compli- 
cated battle-plan, by which, force countervailing force and 
design converging all things upon one fixed point, Good, concrete 
in the creature, should overwhelm not without strife and wounds 
Evil concrete in the creature, and all things, ‘“‘ even the wicked,” 
should be seen harmoniously blending in the glory of the attri- 


44 PROBABILITIES : 


butes of God. The mythologic Pan, rs ray, the great Universal 
All, was deeply interested in the struggle: for the Seed of the 
woman was to bruise the Serpent’s head; not merely as respect- 
ed the small orb about to be, but concerning heaven itself, the 
unbounded “ haysh hamaim,”’ wherefrom dread Lucifer was thus. 
to be ejected. On the earth, a mere planet of humble lustre, 
which the prouder suns around might well despise, was to be 
exhibited this noble and analogous result ; the triumph of a lower 
intelligence such as Man, over a higher intelligence such as 
Angel: because, the former race, however frail, however weak, 
were to find their nature taken into God, and should have for 
their grand exemplar, leader and brother, the Very Lord of all 
arrayed in human guise; while the latter, the angelic fallen 
mass, in spite of all their pristine wisdom and excellency, were 
to set up as their Captain him, who may well and pPNORP RAE 
be termed their Adversary. 

This dark being, probably the mightiest of all mere creatures 
as the embodiment of corrupted good and perversion of an arch- 
angelic wisdom, was about to be suffered to fall victim to his own 
overtoppling ambitions, and to drag with him a third part of the 
heavenly host,—some tributary monarchs of the stars: thus he, 
and those his colleagues, should become a spectacle and a warn- 
ing to all creatures else ; to stand for spirits’ reading in letters of 
fire a deeply burnt-in record how vast a gulf there is between 
the Maker and the made; how impassable a barrier between the 
derived intelligence and its infinite Creator. Such an unholy 
leader in rebellion against good,—let us call him a or b, or why 
not for very euphony’s sake Lucifer and Satanas ?—such a cor- 
rupted excellence of heaven was to meet his final and inevitable 
disgrace to all eternity on the forthcoming battle field of Earth. 
Would it not be probable then that our world soon to be fashioned 
and stocked with its teeming reasonable millions, should concen- 
trate to itself the gaze of the universe, and, from the deeds to be 


. COSMOGONY. 45 


done in it, should arrogate towards man a deep and fixed attention: 
that ‘the morning stars should sing together, and all the sons of 
God should shout for joy.” Let us too, according to the power 
given to us, partake of such attention antecedently in ‘some 
detail: albeit, as always, very little can be tracked of the length 
and breadth of our theme. 

What would probably be the nature of such world and of such 
_creatures, in a physical point of view ? and what, in a moral 
point of view? It is not necessary to divide these questions: for 
the one so bears upon the other, or rather the latter so directs and 
pervades the former, that we may briefly treat of both as one. 

The first probability would be, that, as the creature Man so to 
be abased and so to be exalted must be a responsible and reason- 
able being, everything (with miraculous exceptions just enough 
~ to prove the rule), everything around him should also be respon- 
sible and reasonable. In other words, that, with such exceptions 
as before alluded to, the whole texture of this world should bear 
to an inquisitive intellect the stamp of cause and effect: whilst 
for the mass, such cause and effect should be so little intrusive 
that their easier religion might recognise God in all things 
immediately, rather than mediately. For instance: take the 
cases of stone, and of coal; the one so needful for man’s archi- 
tecture, the other for his culinary warmth. Now, however 
simple piety might well thank the Maker for having so stored 
earth with these for necessary uses; they ought, to a more 
learned though not less pious ken, to seem not to have been 
created by an effort of the Great Father qua stone, or qua coal. 
Such a view might satisfy the ordinary mind: but thinkers 
would see no occasion for a miracle : when Christ raises Lazarus 
from the dead, it would have been a philosophical fault to have 
found the grave clothes and swathing bandages ready loosened 
also. Unassisted man can do that: and unhelped common 
causes can generate stone and coal. ‘The deposits of undated 


46 PROBABILITIES : 


floods, the periodical currents of lava, the still and stagnant lake, 
and the furious upbursting earthquake ; all these would be 
called into play, and not the unrequired, I had almost said un- 
reasonable, energies, which we call miracle. An agglutination 
of shells once peopled with life ; a crystallized lump of segregate 
minerals, once in a molten state; a mass of carbonated foliage 
and trunks of tropical trees buried by long changes under the 
soil, whereover they had once waved greenly luxuriant ; these and 
no other, should have been man’s stone and coal. ‘This instance 
affects the reasonableness of such material creation. Take 
another, bearing upon its analogous responsibilities. As there 
was to be warred in this world the contest between good and evil, 
it would be expectable that the crust of man’s earth, anteriorly 
to man’s existence on it, should be marked with some traces that 
the evil, though newly born so far as might regard man’s own 
disobedience, nevertheless had existed antecedently. In other 
words: it was probable that there should exist geological evi- 
dences of suffering and death: that the gigantic ichthyosaurus 
should be found fixed in rock with his cruel jaws closed upon his 
prey: that the fearful iguanodon should leave the tracks of 
having desolated a whole region of its reptile tribes: that volca- 
noes should have ravaged fair continents prolific of animal and 
vegetable life: that in fine, though man’s death came by man’s 
sin, yet that death and sin were none of man’s creating : he was 
only to draw down upon his head a preéxistent woe, an ante- 
toppling rock. Observe then, that these geological phenomena 
are only illustrations of my meaning: and whether such parables 
be true or false, the argument remains the same: we never build 
upon the sand of simile, but only use it here and there for strew- 
ing on the floor. Still, I will acknowledge that the introduction 
of such fossil instances appears to me wisely thrown in as affects 
their antecedent probability, because ignorant comments upon 
Scriptural cosmogony have raised the absurdest objections 


COSMOGONY. 47 


against the truth of Scriptural science. There is not a tittle of 
known geological fact, which is not absolutely reconcilable with 
Genesis and Job. But this is a word by the way: although 
aimed not without design against one of the poor and paltry 
weak-holds of the infidel. 


48 PROBABILITIES : 


> rn a mmEmnREERnna anne Aen I IE” TAS ATE 


ADAM. 


ReMEMBERING, then, that these are probabilities, and that the 
whole treatise purports to be nothing but a sketch, and not a 
finished picture, we have suggestively thus thrown out that the 
material world, man’s home as man, was likely to have been 
prepared, as we posteriorly know it to be. Now, what of man’s 
own person, circumstances, and individuality ? Was it likely 
that the world should be stocked at once with many several 
races, or with one prolific seed ? with a specimen of every va- 
riety of the genus man, or with the one generic type capable of 
forming those varieties ?—Answer. One is by far the likelier 
in itself, because one thing must needs be more probable than 
many things: additionally; Wisdom and Power are always 
economical, and, where one will suit the purpose, superfluities 
are rejected. That this one seed, covering with its product 
a various globe under all imaginable differences of circumstance 
and climate, should, in the lapse of ages, generate many species 
of the genus Man, was antecedently probable. For example, 
morality, peace and obedience would exercise transforming 
powers: their opposites the like in an opposite way. We can 
well fancy a mild and gentle race, as the Hindoo, to spring from 
the former educationals: and a family with flashing eyes and 
strongly visaged natures, as the Malay, from a state of hatred, 
war, and license. We can well conceive that a tropical sun 
should carbonize some of that tender fabric the skin, adding also 


ADAM. 49 


a a ct ca oe ee ES 


swift blood and fierce passions: while an arctic climate would 
induce a sluggish, stunted race. And, when to these considera- 
tions we add that of promiscuous unions, we arrive at the just 
likelihood that the whole family of man, though springing from 
one root, should, in the course of generations, be what now we 
see it. 

Further. How should this prolific original, the first man, be 
created ?—and for a name let us call him Adam; a justly chosen 
hame enough, as alluding to his medium color, ruddiness. 
Should he have been cast upon the ground an infant, utterly 
helpless, requiring miraculous aid and guidance at every turn ? 
Should he be originated in boyhood, that hot and tumultuous 
time, when the creature is most rash, and least qualified for self- 
government ? or should he be first discerned as an adult in his 
prime, equal alike to obedience and rule, to moral control and 
moral energy ?— 

Add also here ; is it probable there would be any needless in- 
terval placed to procreations? or rather, should not such original 
seed be able immediately to fulfil the blank world call upon him, 
and as the greatly-teeming human father be found fitted from his 
birth to propagate his kind ?—The questions answer themselves. 

Again. Should this first man have been discovered originally 
surrounded with all the appliances of an after civilization, clad, 
and housed, and rendered artificial ? nor rather, in a noble and 
naturally royal aspect appear on the stage of life as king of the 
natural creation, sole warder of a garden of fruits, with all his 
food thus readily concocted, and an eastern climate tempered to 
his nakedness ? 

Now, as to the solitariness of this one seed. From what we 
have already mused respecting God’s benevolence, it would seem 
probable that the Maker might not see it good that man should 
be alone. The seed, originally one, proved (as was likely) to 
resemble its great parent God, and to be partitionable, or reduci- 


3 


50 PROBABILITIES : 


nnn snc 


ble into persons; though with reasonable differences as between 
creature and Creator. Woman,—Eve, the living or lifegiving, 
—was likely to have sprung out of the composite seed Man, in 
order to companionship and fit society. Moreover, it were ex- 
pectable that in the pattern creature, composite man, there should 
be involved some apt mysterious typification of the same creature, 
after a foreknown fall restored, as in its perfect state of reunion 
with its Maker. A posteriori, the figurative notion is, that the 
Redeemed family, or mystical spouse, is incorporated in her hus- 
band, the Redeemer: not so much in the idea of marriage, as 
(taking election into view) of a co-creation ; as it were rib of rib, 
and life woven into life, not copulated or conjoined, but immin- 
gled in the being. This is a mystery most worthy of deep 
searching ; a mystery deserving philosophic care, not less than 
the more unilluminate enjoyment of humble and believing Chris- 
tians. I speak concerning Christ and his church. 


THE FALL. 51 


THE FALL. 


THERE is a special fitness in the fact, long since known, and now 
to be perceived probable, that if mankind should fail in disobe- 
dience, it should rather be through the woman than through the 
man. Because, the man, qua man and the deputed head of all 
inferior creatures, was nearer to his Creator, than the woman: 
who, qua woman, proceeded out of man. She was, so to speak, 
one step further from God ‘ab origine than man was: therefore 
more liable to err and fall away. To my own mind, I confess, 
_ it appears that nothing is more anteriorly probable than the plain 
Scriptural story of Adam and Eve: so simple that the child de- 
lights in it; so deep that the philosopher lingers there with an 
equal but more reasonable joy. 

For, let us now come to the probabilities of a temptation ; and 
a fall; and what temptation ; and how ordered. 

The heavenly intelligences beheld the model-man and model- 
woman, rational beings, and in all points “very good.” The 
Adversary panted for the fray, demanding some test of the obe- 
dience of this new favorite race. And the Lord God was wil- 
ling that the great controversy, which He foreknew and for wise 
purposes allowed, should immediately commence. Where was 
the use of a delay ? If you will reply, To give time to strengthen 
Adam’s moral powers: I rejoin, he was made with more than 
enough of strength infused against any temptation not entering 
by the portal of his will: and against the open door of Will 


52 PROBABILITIES : 

ee a ee ee ee ee 
neither time nor habits can avail. Moreover, the trial was to be 
exceedingly simple; no difficult abstinence, for man might 
freely eat of every thing but one ; no natural passion tempted ; 
no exertion of intelligence requisite. Adam lived in a garden: 
and his Maker, for proof of reasonable obedience, provides the 
most easy and obvious test of it—do not eat that apple. Was it, 
in reality, an improbable test, an unsuitable one ? Was it not 
rather the likeliest in itself, and the fittest as addressed to the 
newborn rational animal which imagination could invent, or an 
amiable Foreknowledge of all things could desire? Had it 
been to climb some arduous height without looking back, or on 
no account to gaze upon the sun, how much less apt and easy of 
obedience. ‘Thus much for the test. 

Now, as to the temptation and its ordering. A creature, to be 
tempted fairly, must be tempted by another equal or lower 
creature ; and through the senses. If mere spirit strives with 
spirit plus matter, the strife is unequal; the latter is clogged ; 
he has to fight in the net of Retiarius. But if both are 
netted, if both are spirit plus matter (that is, material crea- 
tures), there is no unfairness. Therefore, it would seem 
reasonable that the Adversary in person should descend from his 
mere. spirituality into some tangible and humbled form. This 
could not well be man’s, nor the semblance of man’s: for the 
first pair would well know that they were all mankind: and, if 
the Lord God himself was accustomed to be seen of them as in a 
glorified humanity, it would be manifestly a moral incongruity 
to invest the devil in a similar form. It must then be the shape 
of some other creature; as, a lion, or a lamb, or—why not a 
serpent ? Is there any improbability here? and not rather as 
apt an avatar of the sinuous and wily Rebel, the dangerous fas- 
cinating Foe, as poetry at least, nay, as any sterner contrivance 
couldinvent 2 The plain fact is that Reason—given keenness— 
might have guessed this also antecedently a likelihood. 


THE FALL. 53 


A few words more on other details probable to the temptation. 
Wonderful as it may seem to us with our present experience, in 
the case of the first woman it would scarcely excite her asto- 
nishment to be accosted in human phrase by one of the lower 
creatures ; and in no other way could the tempter reach her 
mind. Much as Milton puts it, Eve sees a beautiful snake, eat- 
ing not improbably of the forbidden apple. Attracted by a natu- 
ral curiosity, she would draw near, and in a soft sweet voice the 
serpent, i. e. Lucifer in his guise, would whisper temptation. It 
was likely to have been keenly managed. Is it possible, O fair 
and favored mistress of this beautiful garden, that your Maker 
has debarred you from its very choicest fruit? Only see its 
potencies for good: I, a poor reptile, am instantly thereby endued 
with knowledge and the privilege of speech. Am I dead for the 
eating ?—ye shall not surely die; but shall become as gods 
yourselves ; and this your Maker knoweth. 

The marvellous fruit, invested thus with mystery and tinctured. 
with the secret charm of a thing unreasonably, nay harmfully, 
forbidden, would then be allowed silently to plead its own merits. 
It was good for food: a young creature’s first thought. It was 
pleasant to the eyes: addressing a higher sense than mere bodily 
appetite, that mental predilection for form and color which marks 
fine breeding among men. It was also to be desired to make 
one wise: here was the climax, the great moral inducement 
which an innocent being might well be taken with ; irrespect- 
ively of the one qualification that this wisdom was to be plucked 
in spite of God. Doubtless, it were probable, that, had man not 
fallen, the knowledge of good would never have been long with- 
held: but he chose to reap the crop too soon, and reaped it 
mixed with tares, good—and evil. 

I need not enlarge, in sermon form, upon the theme. It was 
probable that the weaker creature, Woman, once entrapped, she 
would have charms enough to snare her husband likewise: and 


54 PROBABILITIES : 


the results, thus perceived to have been likely, we have long 
since known for fact. That a depraved knowiedge should imme- 
diately occasion some sort of clothing to be instituted by the 
great moral Governor, was likely : and there would be nothing 
near at hand, in fact nothing else suitable, but the skins of beasts. 
There is also a high probability that some sort of slaying should 
take place instantly on the fall, by way of reference to the 
coming sacrifice for sin: and for a type of some imputed right- 
eousness. God covered Man’s evil nakedness with the skins of 
innocent slain animals: even so, Blessed is he whose unright- 
eousness is forgiven, and whose sin is covered. 

With respect to restoration from any such fall. There seems 
a remarkable prior probability for it, if we take into account the 
empty places in heaven, the vacant starry thrones which Sin had 
caused to be untenanted. Just as, in after years, Israel entered 
into the cities and the gardens of the Canaanite and other seven. 
nations, so, it was anteriorly likely, would the ransomed race of 
Men come to be inheritors of the mansions among heavenly pla- 
ces, which had been left unoccupied by the fallen host of Luci- 
fer. There was a gap to be filled: and probably there would 
be some better race to fill it. 


THE FLOOD. 59 


re LLL LD 


THE FLOOD. 


THEMES, like those past and others still to come, are so immense, 
that each might fairly ask a volume for its separate elucidation. 
A few seeds, pregnant with thought, are all that we have here 
space, or time, or power to drop beside the world’s highway. 
The grand outlines of our race command our first attention: we 
cannot stop to think and speak of every less detail. Therefore, 
now would I carry my companion across the patriarchal times at 
once to the era of the Deluge. Let us speculate, as hitherto, an- 
tecedently, throwing our minds as it were into some angelic 
prior state. 

If, as we have seen probable, evil (a concretion always, not an 
abstraction) made some perceptible ravages even in the unbound- 
ed sphere of a heavenly creation, how much more rapid and 
overwhelming would its avalanche (once ill-commenced) be seen, 
when the site of its infliction was a poor band of men and 
women prisoned on a speck of earth. How likely was it that, 
in the lapse of no long time, the whole world should have been 
“corrupt before God, and filled with wickedness.” How proba- 
ble, that taking into account the great duration of pristine human 
life, the wicked family of man should speedily have festered up 
into an intolerable guiltiness. And was this dread result of the 
primal curse and disobedience to be regarded as the Adversary’s 
triumph? Had this Accuser,—the Saxon word is Devil,—had 


56 PROBABILITIES : 


this Slanderer of God’s attribute then really beaten Good ? or was 
not rather all this swarming sin an awful vindication to the universe 
of the great need-be that God unceasingly must hold his creature 
up lest he fall, and that out of Him is neither strength nor wis- 
dom? Was Deity, either in Adam’s case or this, baffled,—nor 
rather justified 2? Was it an experiment which had really failed ; 
nor rather one which by its very seeming failure proved the 
point in question, the misery of creatures when separate from 
God? Yea, the evil one was being beaten down beneath his - 
very trophies in sad Tarpeian triumph: through conquest and 
his children’s sins heightening his own misery. 
. Let us now advert toa few of the anterior probabilities affecting 
this evil earth’s catastrophe. It is not competent to us to trench 
upon such ulterior views as are contained in the idea of types rela- 
tively to antitypes. Neither will we take the fanciful or poetical 
aspect of the coming calamity, that earth, befouled with guilt, was 
likely to be washed clean by water. It is better to ask, as more 
relevant, in what other way more benevolent than drowning 
could, short of miracle, the race be made extinct 2? They were all 
to die in their sins, and swell in another sphere the miserable 
hosts of Satan. There was no hope for them, for there was no 
repentance. It was infinitely probable that God’s longsuffering 
had worn out every reasonable effort for their restoration. They 
were then to die ; but how ?—in the least painful manner _possi- 
ble. Intestine wars, fevers, famines, a general burning-up of 
earth and all its millions, were any of these preferable sorts of 
death to that caused by the gradual rise of water, with hope of 
life accorded still even to the last gurgle ? Assuredly, if ‘the 
tender mercies of the wicked are cruel,” the judgments of the 
Good one are tempered well with mercy. 

Moreover, in the midst of this universal slaughter there was 
one good seed to be preserved: and, as Heaven never works a 
miracle where common cause will suit the present purpose, it 


THE FLOOD. 57 


would have been inconsistent to have extirpated the wicked by 
any such means as must demonstrate the good to have been saved 
only by superhuman agency. 

To considerations of humanity, and of the divine less-interven- 
tion, add that of the natural and easy agency of a long commis- 
sioned comet. No “ Deus e machina’ was needed for this effort : 
one of His ministers of flaming fire was charged to call forth 
the services of water. This was an easy and majestic interfer- 
ence. Ever since man fell, yea, ages before it, the omniscient 
eye of God had foreseen all things that should happen: and His 
ubiquity had, possibly from The Beginning, sped a comet on 
its errant way, which at a calculated period was to serve to wash 
the globe clean of its corruptions: was to strike the orbit of 
earth just in the moment of its passage, and disturbing by attrac- 
tion the fountains of the great deep, was temporarily to raise their 
level. Was not this a just, a sublime, and a likely plan? Was 
it not a merciful, a perfect, and a worthy way? Who should 
else have buried the carcases on those fierce battle-fields, or the 
mouldering heaps of pestilence and famine ?—But, when at Je- 
hovah’s summons, heaving to the comet’s mass, the pure and 
mighty sea rises indignant from its bed, by drowning to cleanse 
the foul and mighty Land,—how easy an engulfing of the 
corpses ; how awful that universal burial ; how apt their monu- 
mental epitaph written in water, “The wicked are like the 
troubled sea that cannot rest ;’’ how dread the everlasting requi- 
em chanted for the whelmed race by the waves roaring above 
them: yea, roaring above them still! for in that chaotic hour it 
seems probable to reason that the land changed place with 
ocean ; thus giving the new family of man a fresh young world 


to live upon. 
3* 


58 PROBABILITIES : 


NOAH. 


Wuen the world, about to grow so wicked, was likely thus to 
have been cleansed, and so renewed, the great experiment of 
man’s possible righteousness was probable to be repeated in 
another form. We may fancy some high angelic mind to have 
gone through some such line of thought as this, respecting the 
battle and the combatants. Were those champions, Lucifer and 
Adam, really fit to be matched together? Was the tourney just; 
were the weapons equal; was it, after all, a fair fight ?—on one 
side, the fallen spirit, mighty still though fallen, subtlest, most 
unscrupulous, most malicious, exerting every energy to rear a 
rebel kingdom against God; on the other, a newborn, inexperi- 
enced, innocent and trustful creature, a poor man vexed with 
appetites, and as naked for absolute knowledge in his mind as for 
garments on his body. Was it, in this view of the case, an equal 
contest ? were the weapons of that warfare matched and mea- 
sured fairly ? 

Some such objection, we may suppose, might seem to have 
been admissible, as having a show at least of reason: and, after 
the world was to have been cleansed of all its creatures in the 
manner I have mentioned, a new champion is armed for the 
conflict, totally different in every respect; and to reason’s view 
vastly superior. 3 

This time, the Adam of renewed earth is to be the best and 
wisest, nay; the only good and wise one of the whole lost family : 


NOAH. 59 


cece 


a man, with the experience of full six hundred years upon his 
hoary brow, with the unspeakable advantage of having walked 
with God all those long-drawn centuries, a patriarch of twenty 
generations, recognised as the one great and faithful witness, the 
only worshipper and Friend of his Creator. Could a finer sam- 
ple be conceived? was not Noah the only spark of spiritual 
“ gonsolation ” in the midst of earth’s dark death? and was not 
he the best imaginable champion to stand against the wiles of 
the devil? Verily, reason might have guessed, that if Deity 
saw fit to renew the fight at all, the representative of Man should 
have been Noah. 

Before we touch upon the immediate fall of this new Adam 
also, at a time when God and reason had deserted him, it will be 
more orderly to allude to the circumstances of his preservation in 
the flood. How, in such a hurlyburly of the elements, should the 
chosen seed survive? No house, nor hilltop, no ordinary ship 
would serve the purpose : still less the unreasonable plan of any 
cavern hermetically sealed, or any aerial chariot miraculously 
lifted up above the lower firmament. To use plain and simple 
words, I can fancy no wiser method than a something between a 
house and a diving-bell; a vessel. entirely stormtight and water- 
tight, which nevertheless for necessary air should have an open 
window at the top: say, one a cubit square. This, properly 
hooded against deluging rain, and supplied with such helps to 
ventilation as leathern pipes, air tunnels, and similar appliances, 
would not be an impracticable method. However, instead of 
being under the water as a diving-bell, the vessel would be 
better made to float upon the rising flood, and thus continually 
keeping its level would be ready to strike land as the waters 
assuaged. 

Now, as to the size of this ark, this floating caravan, it must 
needs be very large; and also take a great time in building. 
For, suffering cause and effect to go on without a new creation, 


60 PROBABILITIES : 


a nT 


it was reasonable to suppose that the Man, so launching as 
for another world on the ocean of existence, would take with 
him (especially if God’s benevolence so ordered it) all the 
known appliances of civilized life; as well as a pair or two of 
every creature he could collect, to stock withal the renewed 
earth according to their various excellences in their kinds. 
Phe lengthy, arduous, and expensive preparation of this mighty 
Ark,—a vessel which must include forests of timber and con- 
sume generations in building; besides the worldbeknown col- 
lection of all manner of strange animals for the stranger fancy 
of a fanatical old man; not to mention also the hoary Preach- 
er’s own century of exhortations: with how great moral force 
all this living warning would be calculated to act upon the 
world of wickedness and doom! Here was the great antedi- 
luvian Potentate, Noah, a patriarch of ages, wealthy beyond our 
calculations—(for how else without a needless succession of 
miracles could he have built and stocked the ark ?)—a man 
of enormous substance, good report, and exalted station, here 
was he for a hundred and twenty years engaged among 
crowds of unbelieving workmen, in constructing a most extra- 
vagant ship, which, forsooth, filled with samples of all this world’s 
stores, was to sail with our only good family in search of a 
better. Moreover, Noah here declares that our dear old mother 
earth is to be destroyed for her iniquities by rain and sea: and 
he exhorts us by a solid evidence of his own faith at least, if by 
nothing else, to repent and turn to him, whom Abel, Seth and 
Enoch as well as this good Noah represent as our maker. Would 
not such sneers and taunts be probable: would they not amply 
vindicate the coming judgment? Was not the “ long suffering 
of God” likely to have thus been tried “while the ark was 
preparing ;”’ and when the catastrophe should come, had not that 
evil generation been duly warned against it? On the whole 3 it 
would have been reason’s guess that Noah should be saved as hé 


NOAH. 61 


was ; that the ark should have been as we read of it in Genesis ; 
and that the very immensity of its construction should have 
served for a preaching to mankind. As to any idea that the 
Ark is an unreasonable (some have even said ridiculous) inci- 
dent to the deluge, it seems to me to have furnished a clear case 
of antecedent probability. 

Lastly ; Noah’s fall was very likely to have happened : not 
merely in the theological view of the matter, as an illustration of 
the truth that no human being can stand fast in righteousness ; but, 
from the just consideration that he imported with him the seéds of 
an impure state of society, the remembered luxuries of that old 
world. For instance, among the plants of earth which Noah 
would have preserved for future insertion in the soil, he could 
not have well forgotten the generous, treacherous Vine. That 
to a righteous man, little used to all unhallowed sources of exhila- 
ration, this should have been a stepping-stone to a defalcation from 
God, was likely. It was probable in itself, and shows the honesty 
as well as the verisimilitude of Scripture to read, that “ Noah be. 
gan to be a husbandman and planted a vineyard ; and he drank 
of the wine and wasdrunken.”? There was nothing here but what, 
taking all things into consideration, Reason might have previously 
guessed. Why then withhold the easier matter of an afterward 
belief ? | 


62 | PROBABILITIES : 


Op 


BABEL. 


Tus book ought to be read, as mentally it is written, with at the 
end of every sentence one of those etceteras, which the genius of 
a Coke interpreted so keenly of the genius of a Littleton : for, 
far more remains on each subject to be said, than in any one has 
been attempted. 

Let us pass on to the story of Babel: I can conceive nothing 
more & priori probable than the account we read in Scripture. 
Briefly consider the matter. A multitude of men, possibly the 
then whole human family once more a fallen race, emigrate 
towards the East and come to a vast plain in the region of Shinar, 
afterwards Chaldea. Fertile, well-watered, apt for every mun- 
dane purpose, it yet wanted one great requisite. The degenerate 
race “put not their trust in God:” they did not believe but that 
the world might some day be again destroyed by water: and 
they required a point of refuge in the possible event of a second 
deluge from the broken bounds of ocean and the windows of the 
skies. They had come from the West ; more strictly the North 
West, a land of mountains, as they deemed them, ready-made 
refuges: and their scheme, a probable one enough, was to con- 
struct some such mountain artificially, so that its top might reach 
the clouds, as did the summit of Ararat. This would serve the 
twofold purpose of outwitting any further attempt to drown them, 
and of making for themselves a proud name upon the earth. So, 
the Lord God, in his etherealized human form (having taken 


BABEL. °° 63 


counsel with His own divine compeers), coming in the guise 
wherein He was wont to walk with Adam and with Enoch and 
his other saints of men, “ came down and saw the tower:”’ truly, 
He needed not have come, for ubiquity was his, and omniscience ; 
but in the days when God and man were (so to speak) less 
chronologically divided than as now, and while yet the trial- 
family was young, it does not seem unlikely that He should. 
God then, in his aspect of the Head of all mankind, took notice 
of that dangerous and unholy combination : and He made within 
His Triune Mind the wise resolve to break their bond of union. 
Omniscience had herein a view to ulterior consequences benevo- 
lent to man, and He knew that it would be a wise thing for the 
future world as well as a discriminative check upon the race 
then living, to confuse the universal language into many discor- 
dant dialects. Was this in any sense an improbable or improper 
method of making “ the devices of the wicked to be of none effect, 
and of laughing to scorn the counsels of the mighty ?”” Was it 
not to have been expected that a fallen race should be disallowed 
the combinative force necessary to a common language, but that 
such force should be dissipated and diverted for moral uses into 
many tongues ?—There they were, all the chiefs of men congre- 
gated to accomplish a vast, ungodly scheme: and interposing 
Heaven to crush such insane presumption,—and withal thereafter 
designing to bless by arranging through such means the future 
interchange of commerce and the enterprise of nationalities,— 
He, in his Trinity, was not unlikely to have said, “Let us go 
down, and confound their language.” What better mode could 
have been devised to scatter mankind, and so to people the 
extremities of earth? In order that the various dialects should’: 
crystallize apart, each in its discriminative lump, the nucleus of: 
a nation; that thereafter the world might be able no longer to 
unite as one man against its Lord, but by conflicting interests, 
the product of conflicting languages, might give to good a better 


64 PROBABILITIES : 


chance of not being altogether overwhelmed ; that, though many 
‘a multitude might go to do evil,” it should not thenceforward 
be the whole consenting family of man; but that, here by one 
and there by one, the remembrance of God should be kept extant, 
and evil no longer acquire an accumulated force, by having all 
the world one nation. 


JOB. 65 


JOB. 


Every “Scriptural incident, and every Scriptural worthy 
deserves its own particular discussion: and might easily obtain 
it. For example ; the anterior probability that human life in 
patriarchal times should have been very much prolonged, was 
obvious ; from consideration of, 1, the benevolence of God ; 2, 
the inexperience of man; and 3, the claim so young a world 
would hold upon each of its inhabitants: whilst Holy Writ itself 
has prepared an answer to the probable objection, that the years 
were lunar years, or months; by recording that Arphaxad and 
Salah and Eber and Peleg and Reu and Serug and Nahor, 
descendants of Shem, each had children at the average age of 
two-and-thirty, and yet the lives of all varied in duration from a 
hundred and fifty years to five hundred. And many similar 
credibilities might be alluded to: what shall I say of Abraham’s 
sacrifice, of Moses and the burning bush, of Jonah also, and 
Elisha, and of the prophets? for the time would fail me to tell 
how probable and simple in each instance is its deep and mar- 
vellous history. There is food for philosophic thought in every 
page of ancient Jewish Scripture scarcely less than in those of 
primitive Christianity: here, after our fashion, we have only 
touched upon a sample. 

The opening scene to the book of Job has vexed the faith of 
many very needlessly : to my mind nothing was more likely to 
have literally and really happened. It is one of those few places 


66 PROBABILITIES : 


eect ia ee nr eS 


where we get an insight into what is going on Elsewhere : it is 
a lifting off the curtain of eternity for once, revealing the magni- 
ficent simplicities constantly presented in the halls of heaven. 
And I am moved to speak about it here, because | think a plain 
statement of its sublime probabilities will be acceptable to many : 
especially if they have been harassed by the doubts of learned 
men respecting the authorship of that rare history. It signifies 
nothing who recorded the circumstances and conversations, so 
long as they were true and really happened: given power, 
opportunity, and honesty, a life of Dr. Johnson would be just as fair 
in fact, if written by Smollett, as by Boswell, or himself. Whether 
then Job the wealthy prince of Uz, or Abraham, or Moses, or 
Elisha, or Eliphaz, or whoever else, have placed the words on 
record, there they stand, true; and the whole book in all its 
points was anteriorly likely to have been decreed a component 
part of revelation. Without it there would have been wanting 
some evidence of a godly worship among men through the long 
and dreary interval of several hundred years: there would never 
have been given for man’s help the example of a fortitude, and 
patience, and trust in God most brilliant ; of a faith in the resur- 
rection and redeemer, signal and definite beyond all other texts 
in Jewish Scripture: as well as of a human knowledge of God in 
his works beyond all modern instance. However, the excel- 
lences of that narrative are scarcely our theme: we return to 
the starting-post of its probability, especially with reference to its 
supernatural commencement. What we have shown credible, 
many pages back, respecting good and evil and the denizens of 
heaven, finds a remarkable after-proof in the two first chapters 
of Job: and for some such reason, by reference, these two chap- 
ters were themselves anteriorly to have been expected. 

Let us see what happened. 

“There was a day when the sons of God came to present 
themselves before the Lord, and Satan came also among them. 


| JOB. 67 
enter ape 9 Sg 
And the Lord. said unto Satan, whence comest thou? Then 
Satan answered the Lord and said, From going to and fro in the 
earth, and from walking up and down in it. And the Lord said 
unto Satan, Hast thou considered my servant Job, that there is 
none like him in the earth, a perfect and an upright man, one 
that feareth God and escheweth evil? Then Satan answered 
the Lord and said, Doth Job fear God for naught? Hast thou 
not made a hedge about him and about his house, and about all 
that he hath on every side? ‘Thou hast blessed the work of his 
hands, and his substance is increased in the land. But put forth 
thine hand now and touch all he hath, and he will curse thee to 
thy face. And the Lord said unto Satan, Behold, all that he 
hath is in thy power ; only upon himself ’put not forth thine hand. 
So Satan went forth from the presence of the Lord.” 

It is a most stately drama: any paraphrase would spoil its 
dignity, its quiet truth, its unpretending yet gigantic lineaments. 
Note; in allusion to our views of evil, that Satan also comes 
among the sons of God: note, the generous dependence placed 
by a Generous Master on his servant well-upheld by that Mas- 
ter’s own free grace: note, Satan’s constant imputation against 
_ piety when blest of God with worldly wealth, Doth he serve for 
_ naught? I can discern no cause wherefore all this scene should 
not have truly happened ; not as in vision of some holy man, 
but as in fact. Let us read on, before further comment. 

_ “ Again, there was a day when the sons of God came to present 
themselves before the Lord, and Satan came also among them to 
present himself before the Lord. And the Lord said unto Satan, 
Whence comest thou? And Satan answered the Lord and said, 
From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and 
down in it. And the Lord said unto Satan, Hast thou considered 
my servant Job, that there is none like him in the earth, a per- 
fect and an upright man, one that feareth God and escheweth 
evil ? and still he holdeth fast his integrity, although thou movedst 


68 PROBABILITIES : 


me against him, to destroy him without cause. And Satan an- 
swered the Lord and said, Skin for skin, yea, all that a man hath 
will he give for his life. But put forth thine hand now, and 
touch his bone and his flesh, and he will curse thee to thy face. 
And the Lord said unto Satan, Behold, he is in thine hand; but 
save his life. So Satan went forth from the presence of the 
Lord, and smote Job with sore boils from the sole of his foot unto 
his crown.” 

Some such scene, displaying the Devil’s malice, slandering 
sneers, and permitted power, recommends itself to my mind as 
antecedently to have been looked for: in order that we might 
know from what quarter many of life’s evils come; with what 
aims and ends they are directed ; what limits are opposed to our 
foe ; and Who is on our side. We needed some such insight 
into the heavenly places; some such hint of what is continually 
going on before the Lord’s tribunal; we wanted this plain and 
simple setting forth of good and evil in personal encounter, of . 
innocence awhile given up to malice for its chastening and its 
triumph. Lo,—all this so probable scene is here laid open to us, 
—and many against reason disbelieve it! 

Note, in allusion to our after theme the locus of heaven, that 
there is some such usual place of periodical gathering. Note, 
the open unchiding loveliness dwelling in the Good One’s words, 
as contrasted with the subtle slanderous hatred of the Evil. And 
then the vulgar proverb, Skin for skin: this pious Job is so in- 
tensely selfish, that let him lose what he may, he heeds it not ; 
he cares for nothing out of his own skin. And there are many 
more such notabilities. 

Why did I produce these passages at length ?—For their Do- 
ric simplicity ; for their plain and masculine features ; for their 
obvious truthfulness; for their manifest probability as to fact, 
and expectability previously to it. Why on earth should they. 
be doubted in their literal sense ? and were they not more likely 


JOB. 69 


to have happened than to have been invented 2 We have no 
such geniuses now as this writer must have been, who by the 
pure force of imagination could have created that tableau. Mil- 
ton had Job to go to. Simplicity is proof presumptive in favor 
of the plain inspiration of such passages: for the plastic mind 
which could conceive so just a sketch, would never have rested 
satisfied, without having painted and adorned it picturesquely. 
Such rare flights of fancy are always made the most of. 

One or two thoughts respecting Job’s trial. That he should 
at last give way, was only probable: he was in short another 
Adam, and had another fall ; albeit he wrestled nobly. Worthy 
was he to be named among God’s chosen three, “Noah, Daniel, 
and Job :”’ and worthy that the Lord should bless his latter end. 
This word brings me to the point I wish to touch on; the great 
compensation which God gave to Job. 

Children can never be regarded as other than individualities : 
and notwithstanding Eastern feelings about increase in quantity, 
its quality is after all the question for the heart. I mean that 
many children to be born, is but an inadequate return for many 
children dying. Ifa father loses a well-beloved son, it is small 
recompense of that aching void, that he gets another. For this 
reason of the affections, and because J suppose that thinkers have 
sympathized with me in the difficulty, I wish to say a word 
about Job’s children, lost and found. It will clear away what is 
to some minds a moral and affectionate objection. Now, this is 
the state of the case. 

The patriarch is introduced to us as possessing so many ca- 
mels and oxen and so forth; and ten children. All these are 
represented to him by witnesses, to all appearance credible, as 
dead; and he mourns for his great loss accordingly. Would 
not a merchant feel to all intents and purposes a ruined man, if 
he received a clear intelligence from different parts of the world 
at once that all his ships and warehouses had been destroyed by 


710 PROBABILITIES : 


Og Ss et as ol oa lle ate ie se 


hurricanes and fire? Faith given, patience follows: and the 
trial is morally the same, whether the news be true or false. 
Remarkably enough, after the calamitous time is past, when the 
good man of Uz is discerned as rewarded by heaven for his pa- 
tience by the double of everything once lost,—his children 
remain the same in number, ten. It seems to me quite possible 
that neither camels, &c., nor children, really had been killed. 
Satan might have meant it so, and schemed it: and the singly- 
coming messengers believed it all, as also did the well-enduring 
Job. But the Scriptural word does not go to say that these 
things happened; but that certain emissaries said they hap- 
pened. I think the Devil missed his mark: that the messengers 
were scared by some abortive diabolic efforts: and that (with 
a natural increase of camels, &c., meanwhile) the patriarch’s 
paternal heart was more than compensated at the last by the 
restoration of his own dear children. They were dead, and are 
alive again; they were lost, and are found. Like Abraham re- 
turning from Mount Calvary with Isaac, it was the Resurrection 
in a figure. 

If to this view objection is made, that, because the boils of Job 
were real, therefore similarly real must be all his other evils ; I 
reply, that in the one temptation, the suffering was to be mental ; 
in the other bodily. In the latter case, positive personal pain 
was the gist of the matter: in the former, the heart might be 
pierced and the mind be overwhelmed without the necessity of 
any such incurable affliction as children’s deaths amount to. 
God’s mercy may well have allowed the evil one to overreach 
himself: and when the restoration came, how double was the joy 
of Job over those ten dear children. 

Again, if any one will urge, that in the common view of the 
case, Job at the last really has twice as many children as before, 
for that he has ten old ones in heaven and ten new ones on 
earth ;—I must, in answer, think that explanation as unsatisfac- 


JOB. 71 
Pi an rn a ENE a 
tory to us, as the verity of it would have been to Job. Affection, 
human affection, is not so numerically nor vicariously consoled : 
and it is perhaps worth while here to have thrown out (what I 
suppose to be) a new view of the case, if only to rescue such 
wealth as children from the infidel’s sneer of being confounded 
with such wealth as camels. Moreover, such a paternal reward 


was anteriorly more probable. 


72 PROBABILITIES : 
intent ll cian ener EA TT 


JOSHUA. 


How many of our superficial thinkers have been staggered at 
the great miracle recorded of Joshua : and how few even of the 
deeper sort comparatively may have discerned its aptness, its 
science, and its anterior likelihood : “Sun, stand thou still upon 
Gibeon ; and thou, moon, in the valley of Ajalon.” Now, con- 
sider, for we hope to vindicate even this stupendous event from 
the charge of improbability. | 

Baal and Ashtaroth, chief idols of the Canaanites, were names 
for sun and moon. It would manifestly be the object of God and 
His ambassador to cast utter scorn on such idolatry. And what 
could be more apt, than that Joshua, commissioned to extirpate 
the corrupted race, should miraculously be enabled as it were to 
bind their own gods to aid in the destruction of such votaries ? 

Again: what should Joshua want with the moon for daylight, 
to help him to rout the foes of God more fiercely 2? Why not, 
according to the astronomical ignorance of those days, let her 
sail away, unconsorted by the sun, far beyond the valley of 
Ajalon? There was a reason here of secret, unobtruded sci- 
ence: if the sun stopped, the moon must stop too; that is to 
say, both apparently : the fact being that the earth must for the 
while rest on its axis. This, I say, is a latent scientific hint ; 
and so likewise is the accompanying mention as a fact, that the 
Lord immediately “rained great stones out of heaven’ upon the 
flying host. For, would it not be the case that, if the diurnal 


JOSHUA, — ° 73 
rotation of earth were suddenly to stop, the impetus of motion 
would avail to raise high into the air by centrifugal force, and 
fling down again by gravity, such unanchored things as broken 


fragments of rock ? 

Once more: our objector will here perhaps inquire, Why not 
then command the earth to stop,—and not tne sun and moon ? 
if thus probably Joshua or his Inspirer knew better 2 Answer. 
Only let a reasonable man consider what would have been the 
moral lesson both to Israelite and to Canaanite, if the great suc- 
cessor of Moses had called out, incomprehensibly to all,— Earth, 
stand thou still on thine axis ;”"—and lo! as if in utter defiance 
of such presumption, and to vindicate openly the heathen gods 
against the Jewish, the very sun and moon in heaven stopped 
and glared on the offender. I question whether such a noon: 
day miracle might not have perverted to idolatry the whole be- 
lieving host: and almost reasonably too. The strictly philoso- 
phical terms would have entirely nullified the whole moral 
influence... God in his word never suffers science to hinder the 
progress of truth: a world] y philosophy does this almost in every 
instance, darkening knowledge with a cloud of words: but the 
science of the Bible is usually concealed in some neighboring 
hint quite handy to the record of the phenomena expressed in 
ordinary language. In fact, for all common purposes, no astro- 
nomer finds fault with such phrases as the moon rising, or the 
sun setting : he speaks according to the appearance, though he 
knows perfectly well that the earth is the cause of it, and not the 
sun or moon. Carry this out in Joshua’s case. 

On the whole, the miracle was very plain, very comprehensi- 
ble, and very probable. It had good cause; for Canaan felt 
more confidence in the protection of his great and glorious Baal, 
than stiff-necked Judah in his barely seen divinity: and surely 
it Was wise to.vindicate the true but invisible God by the humi- 
liation of the false and far-seen idol. This would constitute to all 


4 


74 PROBABILITIES : 


ic Na et RR 


nations the quickly rumored proof that Jehovah of the Israelites 
was God in heaven above as well as on the earth beneath. 
And, considering the peculiar idolatries of Canaan, it seems to 
me that no miracle could have been better placed and better 
timed, in other words, anteriorly more probable, than the com- 
mand of obedience to the Sun and to the Moon. I suppose that 
few persons who read this book will be unaware, that the cir- 
cumstance is alluded to as well in that honest heathen, old He- 
rodotus, as in the learned Jew Josephus. The volumes are not 
near me for reference to quotations : but such is fact: it will be 
found in Herodotus about the middle of Euterpe, connected with 
an allusion to the analogous case of Hezekiah. | 

No miracles, on the whole (to take one after view of the mat- 
ter), could have been better tested : for two armies (not to men- 
tion all surrounding countries) must have seen it plainly ‘and 
clearly: if then it had never occurred, what a very needless 
exposure of the falsity of the Jewish Scriptures! These were 
open, published writings accessible to all: Cyrus and Darius and 
Alexander read them, and Ethiopian eunuchs; Parthians, 
Medes, and Elamites, with all other nations of the earth, had free 
access to those records. Only imagine if some recent history of 
England, Adolphus’s, or Stebbing’s, contained an account of a 
certain day in George the Fourth’s reign having had twenty-four 
hours’ daylight instead of the usual admixture ; could the in- 
tolerable falsehood last a minute? Such a placard would be 
torn away from the records of the land the moment a rash hand 
had fixed it there. But, if the matter were fact, how could any 
historian neglect it ?—In one sense, the very improbability of 
such a marvel being recorded, argues the probability of it having 
actually occurred. 

Much more might here be added: but our errand is accom- 
plished, if any stumbling-block had been thus easily removed 
from some erring thinker’s path. Surely, we have given him 
some reason for faith’s due acceptance of Joshua’s miracle. 


THE INCARNATION. 715 


THE INCARNATION. 


In touching some of the probabilities of our Blessed Lord’s 
career it would be difficult to introduce and illustrate the subject 
better, than by the following anecdote. Whence it is derived 
has escaped my memory ; but I have a floating notion that it is 
told of Socrates in Xenophon or Plato. At any rate, by way of 
giving fixity thereto and picturesqueness, let us here report the 
story as of the Athenian Solomon. 

Surrounded by his pupils, the great heathen Reasoner was 
being questioned and answering questions: in particular respect- 
ing the probability that the universal God would be revealed to 
his creatures. “What a glorious King would he appear,”—said 
one, possibly the brilliant Alcibiades: “ What a form of surpass- 
ing beauty,”’—said another, not unlikely the softer Crito.”” “ Not 
’ answered Socrates. “ Kings and the beautiful 
are few, and the God, if he came on earth as an exemplar, 
would in shape and station be like the greater number.” “ Indeed, 
Master ? then how should he fail of being made a King of men, 


so, my children,’ 


for his goodness, and his majesty, and wisdom 2?” “ Alas! my 
children,” was pure Reason’s just rejoinder,” of mAsioves xaxoi, most 
men are so wicked that they would hate his purity, despise his 
wisdom, and as for his majesty, they could not truly see it. 
They might indeed admire for a time, but thereafter (if the God 
allowed it), they would even hunt and persecute and kill him.” 
“Kill him !”” exclaimed the eager group of listeners ; “ kill Him ? 
how should they, how could they, how dare they kill God?” «I 


76 PROBABILITIES : 


Oe et rc nomena ae ener aac 
did not say, kill God,’ would have been wise Socrates’s reply, 
“for God existeth ever: but men in enmity and envy might even 
be allowed to kill that human form wherein God walked for an 
ensample. That they could, were God’s humility: that they 
should, were their own malice: that they dared, were their own 
grievous sin and peril of destruction. Yea,” went on the keen- 
eyed Sage, “men would slay him by some disgraceful death, 
some lingering, open, and cruel death, even such as the death of 
slaves'!’’—-Now slaves, when convicted of capital crime, were 
always crucified. 

Whatever be thought of the genuineness of the anecdote, its 
uses are the same to us. Reason might have arrived at the sa- 
lient points of Christ’s career, and at His crucifixion! 

I will add another topic: how should the God on earth arrive 
there 2. We have shown that His form would probably be such 
as man’s; but, was he to descend bodily from the atmosphere at 
the age of fullgrown perfection, or to rise up out of the ground 
with earthquakes and fire, or to appear on a sudden in the midst 
of the market-place, or to come with legions of his heavenly host 
to visit his Temple? There was a wiser way than these, more 
reasonable, probable, and useful. Man required an exemplar for 
every stage of his existence up to the perfection of his frame. 
The infant, and the child, and the youth, would all desire the 
human-God to understand their eras ; they would all, if generous 
and such as he would love, long to feel that He has sympathy 
with them in every early trial as in every later grief. Moreover, 
the God coming down with supernatural glories or terrors would 
be a needless expense of ostentatious power. He, whose advent 
is intended for the encouragement of men to exercise their reason 
and their conscience ; whose exhortation is “ he that hath ears to 
hear let him hear;”’ that pure Being, who is the chief preacher 
of Humility, and the Great teacher of man’s responsible. con 
dition,—surely He would hardly come in any way astounding! 7 


THE INCARNATION. 77 


miraculous, addressing his advent not to faith but to sight, and 
challenging the impossibility of unbelief by a galaxy of spiritual 
wonders. Yet, if He is to come at all,—and a word or two of 
this hereafter,—it must be either in some such strange way ; or in 
the usual human way ; or ina just admixture of both. As the first 
is needlessly overwhelming to the responsible state of man, so 
the second is needlessly derogatory to the pure essence of God ; 
and the third idea would seem to be most probable. Let us guess 
it out. Why should not this highest Object of faith and this 
lowest Subject of obedience be born, seemingly by human means, 
but really by divine 2 Why should there not be found some un- 
spotted holy Virgin, betrothed to a just man and soon to be his 
wife, who, by the creative power of Divinity, should miraculously 
conceive the shape divine, which God himself resolved to dwell 
in? Why should she not come of a lineage and family which 
for centuries before had held such expectation? Why should 
not the just man, her afhianced, who had never known her yet, 
being warned of God in a dream of this strange, immaculate 
conception, “ fear not to take unto him Mary his wife,” lest the 
unbelieving world should breathe slander on her purity, albeit 
he should really know her not until after the Holy Birth. There 
is nothing unreasonable here ; every step is previously credible: 
and invention’s self would be puzzled to devise a better scheme. 
The Virgin-born would thus be a link between God and man, 
the great Mediator: his natures would fulfil every condition re- 
quired of their double and their intimate conjunction. He 
would have arrived at humanity, without its gross beginnings, 
and have veiled his Godhead for awhile in a pure though mortal 
tenement. He would have participated in all the tenderness of 
woman’s nature, and thus havé reached the keenest sensibilities 
of men. | 

Themes such as these are inexhaustible: and I am perpetually 
conscious of so much left unsaid, that at every section I seem to 


78 PROBABILITIES : 


fl a ce creas ln secaieeceeiagengemamaachaabiandas 
have said next to nothing. Nevertheless, let it go; the good 
seed yet shall germinate. “Cast thy bread upon the waters, and 
thou shalt find it after many days.” 

It may to some minds be a desideratum, to allude to the ante- 
rior probability that God should come in the flesh. Much of this 
has been anticipated under the head of Visible Deity and else- 
where; as this treatise is so short, one may reasonably expect 
every reader to take it in regular course. For additional consi- 
derations : the Benevolent Maker would hardly leave his creatures 
to perish, without one word of warning or one gleam of know- 
ledge. The question of the Bible is considered further on: but 
exclusively of written rules and dogmas, it was likely that 
Our Father should commission chosen servants of his own, 
orally to teach and admonish ; because it would be in accordance 
with man’s reasonable nature, that he should best and easiest 
learn from the teaching his brethren. So then, after all lesser 
ambassadors had failed, it was to be expected that He should send 
the highest one of all, saying, ‘‘ They will reverence my Son.” 
We know that this really did occur by innumerable proofs, and 
wonderful signs posterior: and now, after the event, we discern 
it to have been anteriorly probable. 

It was also probable in another light. This world is a world 
of incarnations; nothing has a real and potential existence, 
which is not embodied in some form. A theory is nothing ; if 
no personal philosopher, no sect, or school of learners, takes it 
up. An opinion is mere air; without the multitude to give it all 
the force of a mighty wind. An idea is mere spiritual light; if 
unclad in deeds, or in words written or spoken. So also, of the 
Godhead: He would be like all these. HE would pervade 
words spoken, as by prophets or preachers: He would include 
words written, as in the Bible: He would influence Crowds with 
Spirit-stirring sentiments: He would embody the theory of all 
things in one simple, philosophic Form. As this material world 


THE INCARNATION. 79 


is constituted, God could not reveal himself at all, excepting by 
the aid of matter. I mean; even granting that He spiritually 
inspired a prophet, still the man was necessary : he becomes an 
inspired Man ; not mere inspiration. So also of a Book ; which 
is the written labor of inspired Men. There is no doing without 
the Humanity of God, so far as this world is concerned: any 
more than His Deity can be dispensed with, regarding the worlds 
beyond worlds, and the ages of ages, and the dread for ever 


and ever. 


80 . PROBABILITIES: © 


MAHOMETANISM. 


It seems expedient that, in one or two instances, I should attempt 
the illustration of this rule of probability in matters beyond the 
Bible. As very fair ones, take Mahometanism and Romanism. 
And first of the former. 

At the commencement of the 7th century, or a little previ- 
ously to that era, we know that a fierce religion sprang up, pro- 
mulgated by a false Prophet. I wish briefly to show that this 
was antecedently to have been expected. 

In a moral point of view, the Christian world, torn by all man- 
ner of schisms and polluted by all sorts of heresies, had earned 
for the human race, whether accepting the gospel or refusing it, 
some signal and extensive punishment at the hands of Him, who 
is the Great Retributor as well as the Munificent Rewarder. In 
a physical point of view, the civilized kingdoms of the earth had 
become stagnant, arguing that corrupt and poisonous calm which 
is the herald of a coming tempest. The heat of a true religion 
had cooled down into lukewarm disputations about nothings, scho- 
lastical.and casuistic figments ; whilst at the same time the pre- 
valence of peaceful doctrines had amalgamated all classes into a 
luxurious indolence. Passionate Man is not to be so satisfied ; 
and the time was fully come for the rise of some fierce spirit, 
who should change the tinsel theology of the crucifix for the iron 
religion of the sword: who should blow in the ears of the slum- 
bering West the shrill warblast of Eastern fervencies ; who 


MAHOMETANISM. 81 


should exchange the dull rewards of canonization due to penance, 
or an after-life voluntary humiliation under pseudo-saints and 
angels, for the human and comprehensible joys of animal appe- 
tite, and military glory: who should enlist under his banner all 
the frantic zeal, all the pent-up licentiousness, all the heartburn- 
ing hatreds of mankind stifled either by a positive barbarism, or 
the incense-laden cloud of a scarcely-masked idolatry. 

Thus, and then, was likely to arise a bold and self-confiding 
hero, leaning on his own sword: a man of dark sentences, who, 
by judiciously pilfering from this quarter and from that shreds 
of truth to jewel his black vestments of error, and by openly pro- 
claiming that Oneness of the object of all worship which besotted 
Christendom had then, from undue reverence to saints and mar- 
tyrs, virgins and archangels, well nigh forgotten ; a man who, 
by pandering to human passions and setting wide as virtue’s ave- 
nue the flower-tricked gates of vice ; should thus, like Lucifer 
before him, in a cometlike career of victory, sweep the startled 
firmament of earth, and drag to his erratic orbit the stars of 
heaven from their courses. 

Mahomet; his humble beginnings ; his iron perseverance 
under early probable checks; his blind, yet not all unsublime, 
dependence on fatality; his ruthless, yet not all undeserved, 
infliction of fire and sword upon the cowering coward race that 
filled the western world ;—these, and all whatever else besides 
attended his train of triumphs, and all whatever besides has lasted 
among Moors, and ‘Arabs, and Turks, and Asiatics, even to this 
our day—constitute to a thinking mind (and it seems not without 
cause) another antecedent probability. Let the scoffer about 
Mahomet’s success, and the admirer of his hotchpot Koran ; let 
him to whom it is a stumbling-block that error (if indeed, quoth 
he, it be more erroneous than what Christendom counts truth) 
should have had such free course and been glorified, while 
so-called Truth, pede claudo, has limped on even as now cau- 


4* 


82 PROBABILITIES : 


tiously and ingloriously through the well-suspicious world; let 
him who thinks he sees in Mahomet’s success an answer to the 
foolish argument of some, who test the truth of Christianity by 
its Gentile triumphs ; let him ponder these things. Reason, the 
God of his idolatry, might, with an archangel’s ken, have pro- 
phesied some Mahomet’s career: and, so far from such being in 
the nature of any objection to Faith, the idea thus thrown out, 
well-mused upon, will be seen to lend Faith an aid in the way of 
previous likelihood. 

‘“‘ There is one God, and Mahomet is his prophet !”? How ad- 
mirably calculated such a war-cry would be for the circumstan- 
ces of the seventh century. The simple sublimity of Oneness, 
as opposed to school-theology and catholic demons: the glitter 
of barbaric pomp instead of tame observances: the flashing sci- 
metar of ambition to supersede the cross: a turban aigretted with 
jewels for the twisted wreath of thorns. As human nature is, 
and especially in that time was, nothing was more expectable 
(even if prophetic records had not taught it), than the rise and 
progress of that great False Prophet, whose waving crescent even 
now blights the third part of Earth. 


ROMANISM. 83 


ROMANISM. 


WE all know how easy it is to prophesy after the event: but it 
would be uncandid and untrue to confound this remark with 
another cousin-germane to it: to wit; how easy it is to discern 
of any event, after it has happened, whether or not it were ante- 
cedently likely. When the race is over and the best horse has 
won (or by clever jockey-management the worst), how obviously 
could any gentleman on the turf now in possession of particulars, 
have seen the event to have been so probable, that he would have 
staked all upon its issue. 

Carry out this familiar idea ; which, as human nature goes, is 
none the weaker as to illustration, because it is built upon the 
rule “ parvis componere magna.”’ Let us sketch a line or two 
of that great foreshadowing cartoon, the probabilities of Roman- 
ism. 

That our Blessed Master even in His state as man beheld its 
evil characteristics looming on the future, seems likely not alone 
from both His human keenness and His divine Omniscience, but 
from here and there a hint dropped in his Biography. Why 
should He, on several occasions, have seemed, I will say with 
some apparent sharpness, to have rebuked His virgin mother— 
« Woman, what have I todo with thee ?”—“ Who are my Mother 
and my brethren ?”"—‘ Yea—more blessed than the womb which 
bare me and the paps that I have sucked, is the humblest of my 
true disciples.” Let noone misunderstand me : full well I know 
the just explanations which palliate such passages ; and the love 


84 PROBABILITIES : 


stronger than death which beat in that Filial heart. But, take 
the phrases as they stand; and do they not in reason constitute 
some warning and some prophecy that men should idolize the 
mother? Nothing, in fact, was more likely than that a just 
human reverence to the most favored among women should 
have increased into her admiring worship: until the humble and 
holy Mary, with the sword of human anguish at her heart, should 
become exaggerated and idealized into Mother of God—instead 
of Jesus’s human matrix, Queen of heaven, instead of a ran- 
somed soul herself, the joy of angels—in lieu of their lowly fel- 
low worshipper, and the Rapture of the blessed—thus dethroning 
the Almighty. 

Take a second instance ; why should Peter, the most loving, 
most generous, most devoted of them alt, have been singled out 
from among the twelve,—with a ‘“ Get thee behind me, Satan ?” 
—it really had a harsh appearance ; if it were not that, pro- 
phetically speaking, and not personally, he was set in the same 
category with Judas, the ‘‘one who was a devil.”’ I know the 
glosses, and the contexts, and the whole amount of it. Folios 
have been written, and may be written again, to, disprove the 
text; but the more words the less sense: it stands, a record 
graven in the Rock; that same Petra, whereon, as firm and faith- 
ful found, our Lord Jesus built his early Church: it stands, a 
mark indelibly burnt into that hand, to whom were intrusted, not 
more specially than to any other of the saintly sent, the keys of 
the kingdom of heaven: it stands, along with the same Peter’s 
deep and terrible apostasy, a living witness against some future 
Church who should set up this same Peter as the Jupiter of their 
Pantheon: who should. positively be idolizing now an image 
christened Peter, which did duty two thousand years ago asa 
statue of Libyan Jove! But even this glaring compromise was 
a matter probable, with the data of human ambitions, and a rot- 
ten Christianity. . 


ROMANISM. 85 
a samme em ce ne eT 

Examples such as these might well be multiplied: bear with 
a word or two more; remembering always that the half is not 
said which might be said in proof; nor in answering the heap of 
frivolous objections. 

Why,—unless relics and pseudo-sacred. clothes were to be pro- 
phetically humbled into their own mere dust and nothing-worthi- 
ness,—why should the rude Roman soldiery have been suffered 
to cast lots for that vestment, which, if ever spiritual holiness 
could have been infused into mere matter, must indeed have re- 
mained a relic worthy of undoubted worship? It was warm 
with the Animal heat of the Man inhabited by God : it was half 
worn out in the service of His humble travels ; and had even on 
many occasions been the road by which virtue had gone out—not 
of it but—of Him. What? was this wonderful robe to work no 
miracles ? was it not to be regarded as a sort of outpost of the 
being who was Human-God? Had it no essential sacredness, no 
noli-me-tangere quality of shining away the gambler’s covetous 
glance, of withering his rude and venturous hand, or of poison- 
ing like some Nessus shirt the lewd ruffian who might soon there- 
after wear it ?—Not in the least. This woven web,—to which a 
corrupted state of feeling on religion would have raised Cathe- 
drals as its palaces, with singing men and singing women and 
singing eunuchs too, to celebrate its virtues ; this coarse cloth of 
some poor weaver’s working down by the sea of Galilee or in 
some lane of Zion, was still to remain und be a mere unglorified, 
economical, useful garment. Far from testifying to its own in- 
ternal mightiness, it probably was soon sold by the fortunate 
Roman die-thrower to a second-hand shop of the Jewish metropo- 
lis; and so descended from beggar to beggar till it was clean 
worn out. We never hear that, however easy of access so inesti- 
mable relic might then have been considered, any one of the 
numerous disciples, in the fervor of their earliest zeal, threw 
away one thought for its redemption. Is it not strange that no 


86 PROBABILITIES : 

ieee 
St. Helena was at hand to conserve such a desirable invention ? 
Why is there no St. Vestment to keep in countenance a St. Se- 
pulchre and a St. Cross? The poor cloth, in primitive times, 
really was despised. We know well enough what happened 
afterwards about handkerchiefs imbued with miraculous proper- 
ties from holy Paul’s body for the nonce: but this is an inferior 
question and the matter was temporary: the superior case is 
proved: and besides the rule omne majus continet in se minus, 
there are differences quite intelligible between the ‘cases ; where- 
about our time would be less profitably employed than in passing 
on and leaving them unquestioned. Suffice it to say, that “God 
worked those Special miracles,”’—and not the unconscious 
“handkerchiefs or aprons.” ‘Te Deum laudamus’—is Pro- 
testantism’s cry ; “ Sudaria laudemus,”’ would swell the Papal 
choirs. 

Let such considerations as these then are in sample serve to 
show how evidently one might prove from anterior circumstances 
(and the canon of Scripture is an anterior circumstance) the pro- 
bability of the rise and progress of the Roman heresies. And if 
any one should ask, how was such a system more likely to arise 
under a Gentile rather than a Jewish theocracy ? why was a St. 
Paul or a St. Peter, or a St. Dunstan or a St. Gengulphus, more 
previously expectable than a St. Abraham, a St. David, a St. 
Elisha, or a St. Gehazi? I answer—from the idea of idolatry, 
so adapted to the gentile mind, and so abhorrent from the Jewish. 
Martyred Abel, however well respected, has never reached the 
honors of a niche beside the altar. Jephtha’s daughter, for all 
her mourned virginity, was never paraded (that I wot of) for any 
other than a much to be lamented damsel. Who ever asked in 
those old times the mediation of St. Enoch? Where were the 
offerings in jewels or in gold to propitiate that undoubted man of 
God and denizen of heaven, St. Moses? what prows in wax of 
vessels saved from shipwreck hung about the dripping fane of 


ROMANISM. 87 
eee 


Jonah ? and where was, in the olden time, that wretched and in- 
sensate being, calling himself rational and godly, who had ven- 
tured to solicit the good services of Isaiah as his intercessor, or 
to plead the merits of St. Ezekiel as the makeweight for his sins ? 

It was just this; and reasonably to have been expected. For 
when the Jew brought in his religion, he demolished every false 
god, broke their images, slew their priests, and burnt their groves 
with fire. But, when a worldly Christianity came to be in vogue, 
when emperors adorned their banners with the cross, and the 
poor fishermen of Galilee (in their portly representatives) came 
to be encrusted with gems and rustling with Seric silk ;—then 
was made that fatal compromise—then it was likely to have been 
made, which has lasted even until now: a compromise which, 
newly baptizing the damned idols of the heathen, keeps yet St. 
Bacchus and St. Venus, St. Mars and St. Apollo, perched in 
sobered robes upon the so-called Christian altar ; which yet pays 
divine honors to an ancyle or a rusty nail, to the black stones at 
Delphi or the goldshrined bones at Aix ; which yet sanctifies the 
chickens of the capitol, or the cock that startled Peter; which 
yet lets a wealthy sinner by his gold bribe the winking Py- 
thoness, or buy dispensing clauses from “ the Lord our God the 
Pope.” 

There is yet a swarm of other notions pressing on the mind, 
which tend to prove that Popery might have been anticipated. 
Take this view. The Religion of Christ is holy, self-denying, 
not of this world’s praise, and ending with the terrible sanction of 
eternity for good or evil: it sets up God alone supreme, and cuts 
down creature-merit to a point perpetually diminishing ; for the 
longer he does well, the more he owes to the grace which enabled 
him to do it. 

Now, man’s nature is, as we know, diametrically opposite to 
all this: and unable to escape from the conviction of Christian 
truth in some sense, he would bend his shrewd ‘invention to the 


88 PROBABILITIES : 


attempt of warping that stern truth to shapes more consistent with 
his idiosyncrasies. A religious plan might be expected, which, 
in lieu of a difficult holy spirituality, should exact easy mere 
observances ; to say a thousand Paters with the tongue in- 
stead of one “Our Father” from the heart: to exact ge- 
nuflections by the score, but not a single prostration of the 
spirit: to write the cross in water on the forehead often- 
times, but never once to bear its mystic weight upon the 
shoulder. In spite of self-denial, cleverly kept in sight by 
means of eggs, and pulse, and haircloth,—to pamper the deluded 
flesh with many a carnal holiday : in contravention of a kingdom 
not of this world, boldly to usurp the temporal dominion of it all : 
instead of the overwhelming incomprehensibility of an eternal 
doom, to comfort the worst with false assurance of a purgatory 
longer or shorter; that, after all, vice may be burnt out, and 
who knows but that gold buying up the prayers and superfluous 
righteousness of others may not make the fiery ordeal an easy 
one? In lieu of a God brought near to his creatures, infinite 
purity in contact with the grossest sin, as the good Physician 
loveth,—how sage it seemed to stock the immeasurable distance 
with intermediate numina, cycle on epicycle, are on arc, priest 
and bishop and pope, and martyr and virgin and saint and angel, 
all in their stations at due interval soliciting God—to be (as if 
His Blessed Majesty were not so of Himself!) the sinner’s friend. 
How comfortable this to man’s sweet estimation of his own. petty 
penances ; how glorifying to those “filthy rags’ his so-called 
righteousness ; how apt to build up the hierarchist power ; how 
seemingly analogous with man’s experience here, where clerks 
lay the case before commissioners, and commissioners before the 
government, and the government before the sovereign. | 

All this was entirely expectable: and I can conceive that a 
deep Reasoner among the first apostles, even without such super- 
nal light as “the Spirit speaking expressly,” might have so 


os 


ROMANISM. — $9 


: 
calculated on the probabilities to come, as to have written long 


ago words akin to these; ‘In the latter times some shall depart 
from the faith, giving heed to seductive doctrines, and fanciful 
notions about intermediate deities (datpoviwv), perverting truth by 
hypocritical departures from it, searing conscience against its own 
cravings after spiritual holiness, forbidding marriage (to invent 
another virtue), and commanding abstinence from God’s good 
gifts, as a means of building up a creature-merit by voluntary 
humiliation.” At the likelihood that such profane and old 
wives’ fables” should thereafter have arisen, might Paul without 
a miracle have possibly arrived. 

Yet again: take another view. The Religion of Christ, though 
intended to be universal in some better era of this groaning earth, 
was, until that era cometh, meant and contrived for anything 
rather than a Catholicity. True, the Church is so far Catholic 
that it numbers of its blessed company men of every clime and 
every age, from righteous Abel down to the last dear babe 
christened yester-morning ; true, the commission is “to all 
nations, teaching them :” but, what mean the simultaneous and 
easily reconciled expressions,—come out from among them,— 
little flock, gathered out of the Gentiles, a peculiar people, a 
church militant and not triumphant here on earth? Thus shortly 
of a word much misinterpreted: let us now see what the Romanist 
does—what (on human principles) he would be probable to do,— 
with this discriminating religion. He, chiefly for temporal gains, 
would make it as expansive as possible: there should be room at 
that table for every guest, whether wedding-garmented or not ; 
there would be sauces in that poisonous feast fitted to every palate. 
For the cold ascetical mind, a cell and a scourge, and a record 
kept of starving fancies as calling them ecstatic visions vouchsafed 
by some old. Stylite to bless his favored worshipper: for the 
painted demirep of fashionable life, there would: be a: pretty 
pocket-idol, and the snug confessional well-tenanted. by a not 


90 PROBABILITIES : 


unsympathizing father: for the pure girl, blighted in her heart’s 
first love, the papist would afford that seemingly merciful refuge, 
that calm and musical and gentle place, the irrevocable nunnery ; 
a place, for all its calmness, and its music and its gentle reputa- 
tions, soon to be abhorred of that poor child as a living tomb, the 
extinguisher of all life’s aims, all its duties, uses, and delights : 
for the bandit, a tythe of the traveller’s gold would avail to pay 
away the murder, and earn for him a heap of merits kept within 
the cashbox: the educated, highborn and finely moulded mind 
might be well amused with architecture, painting, carving, sweet 
odors and the most wondrous music that has ever cheated man,— 
even while he offers up his easy adorations, and departs, equally 
complacent at the choral melodies as at the priestly absolution : 
while, for those good few, the truly pious and enlightened chil- 
dren of Rome, who mourn the corruptions of their church and 
explain away with trembling tongue her obvious errors and idola- 
tries, for these, the wily scheme,—so probable,—devised an 
undoubted mass of truth to be left among the rubbish. True 
doctrines justly held by true martyrs and true saints, holy men 
of God, who have died in that communion: ordinances and an 
existence which creep up (heedless of corruption though) step by 
step, through past antiquity, to the very feet of the Founder: 
keen casuists, competent to prove any point of conscience or 
objection, and that indisputably,—for they climax all by the high 
authority of Popes and councils that cannot be deceived : pious 
treatises and manuals, verily of flaming heat, for they mingle the 
yearnings of a constrained celibacy with the fervencies of worship 
and the cravings after God. Yes, there is meat here for every 
human mouth: only that, alas for men, the meat is that which 
perisheth, and not endureth unto everlasting life. Rome, thou 
wert sagely schemed: and if Lucifer devised thee not for the 
various appetencies of poor deceivable Catholic Man, verily it 
were pity; for thou art worthy of his handywork. All things to 


ROMANISM. ot 


all men, in any sense but the right, signifies nothing to anybody : 
in the sense of falsehoods, take the former for thy motto: in that 
of single truth, in its intensity, the latter. 

Let not then the accident,—the probable accident, of the Italian 
superstition place any hindrance in the way of one whose mind is 
all at sea because of its existence. What, O man with a soul, 
is all the world else to thee? Christianity, whatever be its 
broad way of pretences, is but in reality a narrow path: be satis- 
fied with the day of small things; stagger not at the inconsis- 
tencies, conflicting words, and hateful strifes of those who say 
they are Christians but “are not, but are of the synagogue of 
Satan.” Judge truth, neither by her foes nor by her friends, 
but by herself. ‘There was one who said (and I never heard that 
any writer from Julian to Hobbes ever disputed his human truth 
or wisdom), ‘‘ Needs must that offences come ; but woe be to that 
man by whom the offence cometh. If they come, be not shaken 
in faith: lo I have told you before. And if others fall away 
or do aught else than my bidding, what is that to thee, follow 
thou ME.” 


92 PROBABILITIES : 


THE BIBLE. 


Wuitst I attempt to show, as now I desire to do, that the Bible 
should be just the book it is, from considerations of anterior proba- 
bility, I must expand the subject a little ; dividing it, 1st, into the 
likelihood of a revelation at all; and 2dly, into that of its ex- 
pectable form and character. 

The first likelihood has its birth in the just Benevolence of our 
heavenly Father, who without dispute never leaves his rational 
creatures unaided by some sort of guiding light, some manifesta- 
tion of himself so needful to their happiness, some sure word of 
consolation in sorrow, or of brighter hope in persecution. That 
it must have been thus an a priori probability has been all along 
proved by the innumerable pretences of the kind so constant up 
and down the world: no nation ever existed in any age or country, 
whose seers and wise men of whatever name have not been be- 
lieved to hold commerce with the Godhead. We may judge from 
this, how probable it must ever have been held. The Sages of 
old Greece were sure of it from reason: and not less sure from 
accepted superstition those who reverenced the Brahmin, or the 
priest of Heliopolis, or the medicine-man among the Rocky 
Mountains, or the Llama of old Mexico. I know that our igno- 
rance of some among the most brutalized species of mankind, as 
the Bushmen in Caffraria and the tribes of New South Wales, has 
failed to find among their rites anything akin to a religion: but 
what may we not yet have to learn of good even about such poor 


THE BIBLE. - 93 
Ae a a A TM RIAA OK, 3.8 OB A aL RRS NS eS 
outcasts ? how shall we prove this negative ? for aught we know 
their superstitions at the heart may be as deep and as deceitful as 
in others ; and, even on the contrary side, the exception proves 
the rule: the rule that every people concluded a revelation so 
likely, that they have one and all contrived it for themselves. 
Thus shortly of the first: and now, secondly, how should God 
reveal himself to men? In such times as those when the world 
was yet young, and the church concentred in a family or an 
individual, it would probably be by an immediate oral teaching ; 
the Lord would speak with Adam; He would walk with Enoch; 
He would, in some pure ethereal garb, talk with Abraham, as 
friend to friend. And thereafter, as men grew and worshippers 
were multiplied, He would give some favored servant a commis- 
sion to be His ambassador: He would say to an Ezekiel, “ Go 
unto the house of Israel and speak my words to them :”? He would 
bid a Jeremiah, “‘ Take thee a roll of a book and write therein all 
the words that I have spoken to thee: He would give Daniel a 
deep vision, not to be interpreted for ages, “ Shut up the words 
and seal the book even to the time of the end:’? He would make 
Moses grave His precepts in the rock, and Job record his trials 
with a pen of iron. Fora family, the Beatific Vision was enough: 
for a congregated nation, as once at Sinai, oral proclamations : 
for one generation or two around the world the zeal and eloquence 
of some great “ multitude of preachers :” but, indubitably, if God 
willed to bless the universal race, and drop the honey of his 
words distilling down the hourglass of Time from generation to 
generation even to the latter days, there was no plan more 
probable, none more feasible, than the pen of a ready writer. 
Further ; and which concerns our argument: what were likely 
to be the characteristic marks of such a revelation? Exclusively 
of a pervading holiness, and wisdom, and sublimity, which could 
not be dispensed with, and in some sort should be worthy of the 
God; there would be, it was probable, frequent evidences of 


94 PROBABILITIES : 


man’s infirmity, corrupting all he toucheth. The Almighty 
works no miracles for little cause: one miracle alone need be 
‘current throughout Scripture: to wit, that which preserves it 
clean and safe from every perilous error. But, in the succession 
of a thousand scribes each copying from the other, needs must 
that the tired hand and misty eye would occasionally misplace a 
letter : this was no nodus worthy of a God’s descent to dissipate 
by miracle. 

Again: the original prophets themselves were men of various 
characters and times and tribes. God addresses men through 
their reason; he bound not down a seer “ with bit and bridle, 
like the horse that has no understanding,’”’—but spoke as to a ra- 
tional being,—‘‘ What seest thou ?”’ “ Hear my words ;”,—“ Give 
ear unto my speech.” Was it not then likely that the previous 
mode of thought and providential education in each holy man of 
God should mingle irresistibly with his inspired teaching ? 
Should not the herdsman of Tehoa plead in pastoral phrase, and 
the royal son of Amoz denounce with strong authority ? Should 
not David whilst a shepherd praise God among his flocks, and 
when a king, ery, “‘ Give the King thy judgments ?”” The Bible 
is full of this human individuality ; and nothing could be thought 
as humanly more probable: but we must, with this diversity, 
connect the other probability also, that which should show the 
work to be divine ; which would prove (as is literally the case) 
that, in spite of all such natural variety, all such unbiassed 
freedom both of thought and speech, there pervades the whole 
mass a oneness, a marvellous consistency, which would be likely 
to have been designed by God, though little to have been dreamt 
by man. 

Once more on this full topic. Difficulties in Scripture were 
expectable for many reasons ; I can only touch a few. Man is 
rational as he is responsible: God speaks to his mind and moral 
powers: and the mind rejoices and moralities grow strong in 


THE BIBLE. 95 
Seems ceareescaroereaneerese en er 


conquest of the difficult and search for the mysterious. The 
muscles of the spiritual athlete pant for such exertion: and with- 
out it they would dwindle into trepid imbecility. Curious man, 
courageous man, enterprising, shrewd, and vigorous man, yet 
has a constant enemy to dread in his own indolence: now, a 
lion in the path will wake up Sloth himself: and the very dif- 
ficulties of religion engender perseverance. 

Additionally : I think there is somewhat in the consideration, 
that, if all revealed truth had been utterly simple and easy, it 
would have needed no human interpreter ; no enlightened class 
of men, who, according to the spirit of their times, and the 
occasions of their teaching, might “in season and out of season 
preach the word, reprove, rebuke, exhort, with all long-suffering 
and doctrine.” I think there existed an anterior probability that 
Scripture should be as it is, oftentimes difficult, obscure, and 
requiring the aid of many wise to its elucidation; because, 
without such characteristic, those many wise and good would 
never have been called for. Suppose all truth revealed as 
clearly and indisputably to the meanest intellect as a sum in 
addition is, where were the need or use of that noble Christian 
company who are everywhere man’s almoners for charity and 
God’s ambassadors for peace ? 

A word or two more, and I have done. The Bible would, as 
it seems to me’ probable, be a sort of double book ; for the right- 
eous, and for the wicked: to one class, a decoy, baited to allure 
all sorts of generous dispositions: to the other, a trap, set to catch 
all kinds of evil inclinations. In these two senses, it would ad- 
dress the whole family man: and every one should find in it 
something to his liking. Purity should there perceive green pas- 
tures and still waters, and a tender Shepherd for its innocent 
steps: and carnal appetite should here and there discover some 
darker spot, which the honesty of heaven had filled with memo- 
ries of its chiefest servants’ sins; some record of adultery or 


96 PROBABILITIES : 


murder wherewith to feast his maw for condemnation. While 
the good man should find in it meat divine for every earthly 
need, the sneerer should proclaim it the very easiest manual for 
his jests and lewd profanities. The unlettered should not lack 
humble, nay vulgar, images and words, to keep himself in coun- 
tenance: neither should the learned look in vain for reasonings ; 
the poet for sublimities; the curious mind for mystery ; nor the 
sorrowing heart for prayer. I do discern, in that great Book, a 
wondrous adaptability to minds of every calibre: and it is just 
what might antecedently have been expected of a volume writ by 
many men at many different eras, yet all superintended by one 
master mind; of a volume meant for every age, an@nation, and 
country and tongue and people: of a volume, which, as a two- 
edged sword, wounds the good man’s heart with deep conviction, 
and cuts down “the hoary head of him who goeth on still in his 
wickedness.” | 

On the whole, respecting faults, or incongruities, or objection- 
able parts in Scripture, however to have been expected, we must 
recollect that the more they are viewed, the more the blemishes 
fade and are altered into beauties. 

A little child had picked up an old stone, defaced with time- 
stains: the child said the stone was dirty, covered with blotches 
of all colors: but his father brings a microscope, and shows to 
his astonished glance that what the child thought dirt, is a forest 
of beautiful lichens, fruited mosses, and strange lilliputian plants 
with shapely animalcules hiding in the leaves, and rejoicing in 
their tiny shadow. Every blemish, justly seen, had turned to be 
a beauty: and Nature’s works are vindicated good, even as the 
Word of Grace is wise. 


HEAVEN AND HELL. 97 


HEAVEN AND HELL. 


PRoBABLY enough, the light which I expect to throw upon this 
important subject, will, upon a cursory criticism, be judged fan- 
ciful, erroneous, and absurd: in parts, quite open to ridicule, and 
in all liable to the objection of being wise—or foolish—beyond 
what is written. Nevertheless, and as it seems to me of no small 
consequence to reach something more definite on the subject than 
the Anywhere or Nowhere of common apprehensions, I judge it 
not amiss to put out a few thoughts, fancies,—if you will, but 
not unreasonable—fancies on the localities and other character- 
istics of what we call heaven and hell: in fact, I wish to show 
their probable realities with somewhat approaching to distinet- 
ness. It is manifest that these places must be somewhere : for, 
more especially of the Blest Estate, whither did Enoch and Eli- 
jah and our Risen Lord ascend to? what became of these glori- 
fied humanities when “ the chariot of fire carried up Elijah by a 
whirlwind into heaven ;” and when “HE was taken up, and a 
cloud received Him?” Those happy mortals did not waste 
away to intangible spiritualities as they rose above the world: 
their bodies were not melted as they broke the bonds of gravita- 
tion, and pierced earth’s swathing atmosphere: they went up 
somewhither: the question is where they went to. It is a ques- 
tion of great interest to us; however, among those matters which: 
are. rather curious than consequential; for in our own case, as 
we know, we that are redeemed are to be caught up together 


5 


98 PROBABILITIES : 


with other blessed creatures “in the clouds to meet our coming 
Saviour in the air: and thereafter to be ever with the Lord.” I 
wish to show this to be expected as in our case, and expectable 
previously to it. 

We have, in the book of Job, a peep at some place of congre- 
gation: some one, as it is likely, of the mighty globes in space, 
set apart as God’s especial temple. Why not? they all are 
worlds: and,—the likelihood being in favoy of overbalancing 
good rather than of preponderating evil from considerations that 
affect God’s attributes and the happiness of his creatures,—it is 
probable that the great majority of these worlds are unfallen 
mansions of the blessed. Perhaps each will be a kingdom for 
one of earth’s redeemed: and, if so, there will at last be found 
fulfilled that prevailing superstition of our race, that each man 
has his star: without insisting upon this, we may reflect that 
there is no one universal opinion which has not its foundation in 
truth. Tradition may well have dropped the thought from Adam 
downwards, that the stars may some day be our thrones. We 
know their several vastness and can guess their glory: verily a 
mighty meed for miserable services on earth to find a just ambi- 
tion gladdened with the rule of spheres to which Terra is a 
point ; while that same ambition is sanctified and legalized by 
ruling as vicegerent of Jehovah. 

Is this unlikely ; or unworthy of our high vocation ; our im- 
mortality, and nearness unto, nay communion with God? ‘The 
idea is only suggested: let a man muse at midnight and look up 
at the heavens hanging over all; let him see, with Rosse and 
Herschell, that, multiply power as you will, unexhausted still 
and inexhaustible appear the myriads of worlds unknown. Yea, 
there is space enow for infinite reward: yea, let every grain of 
sand on every shore be gathered, and more innumerable yet ap- 
pear that galaxy of spheres. Let us think that night looks down 
upon us here with the million eyesof heaven. And, for some focus 


HEAVEN AND HELL. 99 


of them all, some spot where God himself enthroned receives the 
homage of all crowns, and the worship of all creature service, 
what is there unreasonable in suggesting for a place, some such 
an one as is instanced below ? 

I have just cut the following paragraph out of a newspaper: is 
this the ridiculous tripping up the sublime ?—I think otherwise : 
it is honest, to use plain terms. I speak as unto wise men: 
judge ye what I say. With respect to the fact of information, it 
may or it may not be true: but even if untrue, the idea is sub- 
stantially the same: and I cannot help supposing that with 
angels and archangels and the whole company of heaven such 
bodily saints as Enoch is (and similar to him all risen holy men 
will be), meet for happy Sabbaths in some glorious orb akin or 
superior to the following: 


“A ceNTRAL Sun.—Dr. Madier, the Professor of Astronomy 
at Dorpat, has published the results of the researches pursued by 
him uninterruptedly during the last sixty years, upon the move- 
ments of the so-called fixed stars. These more particularly 
relate to the star Alcyone (discovered by him), the brightest of 
the seven bright stars of the group of the Pleiades. This star he 
states to be the central sun of all the systems of stars known to 
us. He gives its distance from the boundaries of our system at 
34,000,000 times the distance of the sun from our earth—a dis. 
tance which it takes five hundred and thirty-seven years for light 
to traverse. Our sun takes one hundred and eighty-two million 
years to accomplish its course round this central body, whose 
mass is one hundred and seventeen million times larger.than the 
sun.” 


One hundred and seventeen million times larger than the 
Sun !—itself, for all its vastness, not more than half one million 
times bigger than this earth. To some such globe we may let 
our fancies float, and anchor there our yearnings after heaven, 


100 PROBABILITIES : 


It is a glorious thought, such as imagination loves: and a proba- 
ble thought, that commends itself to reason. Behold the great 
eye of all our guessed creation: the focus of its brightness, and 
the fountain of its peace. 

A topic, far less pleasant but alike of interest to us poor men, 
is the probable home of evil: and here I may be laughed at ; 
laugh,—but listen: and if, listening, some reason meets thine 
ear, laugh at least no longer. 

We know that, for spirit’s misery as for spirit’s happiness, 
there is no need of place: “no matter where, for I am still the 
same,’ said one most miserable being. More; in the case of 
mere spirits, there isno need for any apparatus of torments, or 
fires, or other fearful things. But, when spirit is married to 
matter, the case is altered: needs must a place to prison the 
matter, and a corporal punishment to vex it. 

Nothing is unlikely here: excepting—will a man urge ?—the 
dread duration of such hell. This isa parenthesis ; but it shall 
not be avoided; for the import of that question is deep, and 
should be answered clearly. A man, a body and soul immixt, 
body risen incorruptible, and soul rested from its deeds, must 
exist forever. I touch not here the proofs; assumeit. Now, if 
he lives for ever, and deliberately chooses evil, his will consenting 
as well as his infirmity, and conscience seared by persisted 
disobedience, what course can such a wilful, rational, responsi- 
ble being pursue than one perpetually erratic 2 How should it 
not be that he gets worse and worse in morals, and more and 
more miserable in fact? and when to this we add, that such 
wretched creatures are to herd together, continually flying 
further away from the only source of Happiness and Good ; and 
to this, that they have earned, by sin, remorses, and regrets, and 
positive inflictions: how probable seems a hell,—the sinner’s 
doom eternal. The apt mathematical analogy of lines thrown 
out of parallel helps this for illustration: for ever and for eve1 


HEAVEN AND HELL. i0i 


a oa en ea ur een ar coe ree eT | 


they are stretching more remote: and infinity itself cannot re- 
unite their travel. ; 

This then as a passing word: a sad one. Honest thinker, do 
not scorn it, for thine own soul’s sake. “Now is the time of 
grace, Now is the day of salvation.”? To return. A place of 
punishment exists ; to what quarter shall we look for its anterior 
probability ? I think there is a likelihood very near us. There 
may be one possibly beneath us: in the bowels of this fiery- 
bursting earth: whither went Korah and his company ?—this 
idea is not without its arguments, just analogies, and scriptural 
hints. But my judgment inclines towards another. This trial- 
world, we know, is to be purified and restored, and made a new 
earth: it was even to be expected that Redemption should do 
this, and I like not to imagine it the crust and case of Hell. 
But, rather as thus: At the birth of this same world, there was 
struck off from its burning mass at a tangent, a mournful satel. 
lite, to be the home of its immortal evil ; the convict shore for 
exiled sin and misery: a satellite of strange differences, as 
guessed by Virgil in his musings upon Tartarus: where half the 
orb is, from natural necessities, blistered up by constant heats, 
the other half frozen by perennial cold. A land of caverns, and 
volcanoes, miles deep, miles high : with no water, no perceptible 
air: imagine such a dreadful world, with neither air nor water! 
Incapable of feeding life like ours, but competent to be a place 
where undying wretchedness may struggle for ever. A melan. 
choly orb, the queen of night, chief’nucleus of all the dark 
idolatries of earth,—the Moon, Isis, Hecate, Ashtaroth, Diana of 
the Ephesians ! 

This expression of a thought by no means improbable gives an 
easy chance to shallow punsters: but ridicule is no weapon 
against reason. Why should not the case be so? Why should 
not Earth’s own satellite, void, as yet, be on the resurrection of 
all flesh, the raft whereon to float away Earth’s evil? Read of. 


102 PROBABILITIES : 


i ae Se 


it astronomically ; think of it as connected with idols ; regard it 
as the ruler of earth’s night; consider that the place of a Gehen- 
na must be somewhere ; and what is there in my fancy quite 
improbable? I do not dogmatize as that the fact is so, but only 
suggest a definite place at least as likely as any other hitherto 
suggested. Think how that awful, melancholy eye looks down 
on deeds of darkness? how many midnight crimes, murders, 
thefts, adulteries, and witchcrafts, that would have shrunk into 
nonentity from open honest day, have paled the conscious Moon ! 
Add to all this, it is the only world, besides our own, whereof 
astronomers can tell us; It is fallen. 


AN OFFER. 103 


ce 


AN OFFER. 


NotuHine were easier than to have made this book a long one ; 
but that was not the writer’s object: as well because of the 
musty Greek proverb about long books; which in every time 
and country are sure never to be read through by one in a thou- 
sand ; as because it is always wiser to suggest than to exhaust a 
topic; which may be as “a fruit-tree yielding fruit after its kind 
whose seed is in itself.” The writer then intended only to touch 
upon a few salient points, and not to discuss every question, how. 
ever they might crowd upon his mind: time and space alike 
with mental capabilities forbade an effort so gigantic: added to 
which, such a course seemed to be unnecessary, as the rule of 
probability, thus illustrated, might be applied by others in every 
similar instance. Still, as the errand of this book is usefulness, 
and its author’s hope is, under Heaven, to do good, one personal 
hint shall here be thrown upon the highway. Without arrogat- 
ing to myself the wisdom or the knowledge to solve one in twenty 
of the doubts possible to be propounded; without also designing 
even to attempt such solutions, unless well assured of the genuine 
anxiety of the doubter ; and, preliminarizing the consideration, 
that a fitting diffidence in the advocate’s own powers is no rea- 
son why he should not make wide efforts in his holy cause ; that, 
such reasonable essays to do good have no sort of brotherhood 
with a fanatical Spiritual Quixotism ; and that, to my own appre- 
hensions, the doubts of a rationalizing mind are in the nature of 


104 PROBABILITIES : 

Fi ee 
honorable foes, to be treated with delicacy, reverence, and 
kindness, rather than with a cold distance and an ill-concealed 
contempt ; preliminarizing, lastly, the thought,—“ Who is suf- 
ficient for these things ?”—I nevertheless thus offer, according to 
the grace and power given to me, my best but humble efforts so 
far to dissipate the doubts of some respecting any Scriptural 
fact, as may lie within the province of showing or attempting to 
show its previous credibility. This is not a challenge to the 
curious casuist or the sneering infidel; but an invitation to the 
honest mind harassed by unanswered queries: no gauntlet 
thrown down, but a brother’s hand stretched out. Such ques- 
tions, if put to the writer, through his publisher by letter, may 
find their reply in a future edition: supposing, that is to say, 
that they deserve an answer, whether as regards their own 
merits or the temper of the mind who doubts ; and supposing also 
that the writer has the power and means to answer them dis- 
creetly. It is only a fair rule of philanthropy (and that without 
arrogating any unusual “ strength”) to “bear the infirmities of 
the weak, and not to please ourselves :” and nothing would to me 
give greater happiness than to be able, as I am willing, to remove 
any difficulties lying in the track of Faith before a generous 
mind. I hang out no glistening holly-bush aflame with its 
ostentatious berries as promising good wine; but rather over my 
portal is the humbler and hospitable misletoe, assuring every 
wearied pilgrim in the way, that though scanty be the fare, he 
shall find a hearty welcome. 


CONCLUSION. 103 
Sc oN 


CONCLUSION. 


I Have thus endeavored (with solicited help of Heaven) to place 
before the world anew a few old truths: truths inestimably pre- 
cious. Remember, they cannot have lost by any such advocacy 
as is contained in the idea of their being shown antecedently 
probable ; for this idea affects not at all the fact of their exist- 
ence; the thing is; whether probable or not; there is, in 
esse, an ornithorhyncus ; its posse is drowned in esse: there 
exists no doubt of it: evidence, whether of scnses physical, 
or of considerations moral, puts the circumstance beyond the 
sphere of disputation. But such truths as we have spoken of do, 
nevertheless, gain something as to,—not their merits, these are 
all their own substantially, nor their positive proofs, these are 
adjectives properly attendant on them, but as to—their accepta- 
bility among the incredulous of men; they gain, I say, even by 
such poor pleading as mine, from being shown anteriorly proba- 
ble. ‘Take an illustration in the case of that strange and anoma- 
lous creature mentioned just above. Its habitat is in a land 
where plums grow with the stones outside, where aboriginal dogs 
have never been heard to bark, where birds are found covered 
with hair, and where mammals jump about like frogs! If these 
are shown to be literal facts, the mind is thereby well prepared 
for any animal monstrosity : and it staggers not in unbelief (on 
evidence of honest travellers) even when informed of a creature 


Be 


106 PROBABILITIES : 


oe 
with a duck’s bill and a beaver’s body: it really amounted in 
Australia to an antecedent probability. 

Carry this out to matters not a quarter so incredible, ye think. 
ers, ye free-thinkers ; neither be abashed at being named as 
thinking freely : were not those Bereans more noble in that they 
searched to see 2. For my humble part I do commend you for 
it: treacherous is the hand that roots up the inalienable right of 
private judgment; the foundation stone of Protestantism, the 
great prerogative of reason, the keynote of conscience, the sole 
vindex of a man’s responsibility : evil and false is the so-called 
reverential wisdom which lays down in place of the truth that 
each man’s conscience is a law unto himself, the tyranny of 
other men’s authority. Cheap and easy and perilled is the faith, 
which clings to the skirt of others ; which leans upon the broken 
staff of priestcraft, until those poisoned splinters pierce the hand. 

Prove all things; holding fast that which is good: good to 
thine own reasonable conscience, if unwarped by casuistries, and 
unblinded by licentiousness. Prove all things, if you can, “ from 
the egg to the apple:’”’ he is a poor builder of his creed, who 
takes one brick on credit. Be able, as you can be (if only you 
are willing so far to be wisely inconsistent, as to bend the stub- 
born knee betimes, and though with feeble glance to look to 
heaven, and though with stammering tongue to pray for aid) be 
able, as it is thy right, O man of God—to give a Reason for the 
Faith that is in thee. 


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